The photography year of 2025

When I look into my photo library, I get the feeling that 2025 was a quite unproductive year for my photography. But was it really?
When I dig deeper, I find quite a few images that I like. The problem is that I've been rearranging my photo archive several times, used several different photo editing apps after I decided to move away from Adobe, I've been way too strict about what photos to keep and not, while many of the remaining photos still are unedited after I made the final decision about what would be my primary editing tool. The next project should probably be to edit all of them and export as jpgs in a collection folder so that I actually know what I have. And also - not be so hard on myself and my photos in the future, and not throw them away unless they're OBVIOUSLY bad.

Last Christmas I tried to have a plan for how to keep taking photos during the dark bad-weather season and when I played with ideas for a food competition I took photos like this one below. I loved it, but later ditched it with the thought "What am I going to use that for?"

But late in the autumn, the competition admin in my camera club asked me for it, because they had decided to enter it in a regional competition between clubs. Gulp! Thanks to our shared network hard drive at home, backups, and thanks to how Apple creates extra trash files, we were able to retrieve it. I now even have it printed, and learned a lesson.

I planned to take more photos with those figurines, but then my creativity started going downhill. I probably started overthinking it, and the spring became a struggle with imposter syndrome and the thought "How do I learn to be more creative in photography?"
Worrying too much about this probably defeats the purpose - we can certainly learn and practise creativity, but perhaps it's more about letting ourselves play and explore rather than learning a skill.

I read this blog post by Robin Wong, and saw this video by Rick Bebbington, which both inspired me to stop reading and studying, because what I needed was to get out there and shoot more photos. You learn and improve your skills by doing the thing.

In late April I started a project to shoot 5 photos every day, with two main goals - they didn't have to be "good" but they needed to have some intention, meaning the subject should be something that caught my interest but with no further thought than that. Some photos were of simple objects around the house, others were of plants in the garden. Eventually the spring kicked off for real, and I didn't need to push myself to take photos every day, because the whole world out there became interesting and photogenic.

The camera walks

Most of my photography happens when I'm out walking, and during 2025 I walked a LOT. I had several favourite walking routes in 2025, a few through farmlands near me, a few along the sea and one in a small forest leading out to a cliff walk.

I also enjoyed a lot of walking when we were in Italy and some of my favourite photos of 2025 were taken there.

Pianella

Pineto and the fantastic pine forest along the beach

Some fabulous walks on the mountain

The gigs

I love shooting gigs. But I don't follow the advice to crawl around all over the place to get the perfect angle. I'm also a music lover, and I'm there primarily to enjoy the music. Photographing the gig is just a side thing I do for the challenge, so I do it from where I sit (as close to the front row as possible). I would certainly get better photos if I moved around, but I'll save that for if I ever get asked/hired to take those photos.

The lighting conditions are usually tough, with low light combined with coloured stage lights in red, blue, purple, or something like that. Sometimes it gives a cool effect but mostly it makes people look awful, and this is why I make most of my gig photos black and white.

In early February, Special Consensus played in north Cork. I took some photos, but that particular stage is incredibly ugly and cluttered and with some light pollution. I'm never happy with the photos I take there and in the future I'll focus on close-ups.

Two weeks later we went to see Paddy Keenan and a few others in our local venue. While Keenan was the main act, this guitar and accordion player (Tim Edey) was far more interesting to photograph!

A bluegrass band with members from Germany, Holland and the US came to play in another venue in late May:

And in September we enjoyed some gigs at the guitar festival in our hometown.

The races

My husband keeps running marathons and other races, and I take the opportunity to be there with the camera and explore sports photography.

This is a moment from the Limerick marathon. My husband either disappears behind other athletes or pops up from nowhere in races no matter how I try to track him through Garmin. There was no time to prepare, just point and shoot. Thank goodness for burst mode! The post-processing was a big challenge with the shadows on his face, the pink, and distracting elements are not always possible to remove. I still love this photo.

Just before out trip to Italy I found out there would be a charity race in our town, and after many ifs and buts, we managed to get my better half registered. This was so much fun! Except we thought the non-competitive group (which was the only one he could register for at the time) would run 3 km, but in reality everyone kept running all the same loops as the competitive group, 7 km in total. If you're a runner you know the difference in pacing and planning! I also need to mention it was 33C with very high humidity. He did very well nevertheless! And the race was super fun to photograph.

The macro attempts

After moving to Ireland my macro shooting has slowed down a lot because of the windy weather. For this reason I don't want to buy a macro lens for my new camera because I simply wouldn't use it enough, and for those random opportunities I already have a good macro lens for the Olympus. But sometimes I want the full-frame quality, so this year I bought some extension tubes for my Sony camera to see how they work as an alternative to a macro lens. It was a HUGE learning curve with a lot of frustration along the way. I never got those great, sharp photos I see others achieve, but at least I made progress. And why did I choose bumblebees as a starter subject? They are fast-moving and very hard to photograph.

You can read more about it in this post. To be continued during 2026.

The battle between screens

In the early autumn I realised that my photos looked too bland and saturated on my laptop screen, and that my big, otherwise very fancy screen was off in both brightness, contrast and colour temperature. I fiddled with everything I could but wasn't able to solve the problem. I had somehow lost the license number for my calibration tool, and instead tested another screen I had used in the past and found it worked better. I now have that special screen for photo editing and have it set up so that I can swing it to the side to only use that bigger screen for work. Perhaps I can still do some further adjustments on the settings of the bigger screen but in the meantime I have one that works. Now I likely need to re-edit a lot of my photos, and I probably should get a new calibration tool.

Photography plans for 2026

For next year I have one important goal.
Take more photos. But take more photos with intention. Pay more attention. And most importantly - have fun with the camera, explore, and always photograph what I find interesting.

I'll also play with new gear. During the late autumn I started preparing to sell some of my Micro Four Thirds lenses at MPB and trade them in for a 35mm prime lens for my Sony camera. It wasn't at all that simple though. The quote expired, suddenly a new quote popped up on my account and trade-in didn't happen. But I got to sell the lenses, and instead of the 35mm lens I've decided to buy the classic Sony 50mm f1.8 lens in a local shop. Previously I wasn't a fan of the 50mm focal length but it's lighter and I need something that isn't wide angle. I look forward to play with it, and particularly test it with my extension tubes.

Some inspiration highlights

Here's a list of people/blogs/YouTubers who inspired me this year:

• Anthony Crothers - No-BS inspiring videos about photography and learning photography
• Rick Bebbington - Inspiring photographer about creativity
• Megapixel road - A pleasant, inspiring and down-to-earth photography blog
• This brilliant article about "aesthetic photography"

That's all for the 2025 recap. Perhaps I'll be back with some new photos taken with the new prime lens, but if not, I'll see you in 2026.

Linking up with the Weekend Coffee Share hosted by Natalie the explorer