Gentoo penguins on an iceberg, Antarctica
Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all have a wonderful holiday, and lots of beautiful light and wonderful adventures during the coming year.
Claudia and I will be ringing in the New Year at 30,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean while flying to Chile, and then we’ll continue to Antarctica on January 3rd. I can’t wait to get back to the land of ice and penguins! And I can’t think of a better way to start the new year.
— Michael Frye
The votes are all in and counted, and here are my top photographs of 2025!
We had a great response this year: 542 people looked through my initial selection of 52 images and voted for their favorites. A big thank you to everyone who took the time to view these photographs and voice your opinions! I also really appreciate the kind words so many people posted in the comments or sent by email. I wish I could respond to everyone, but please know that I’ve read them all and am very grateful for all your support.
10. Snow, trees, and sunbeams, Hokkaido, Japan
Just a reminder that this is the last day to cast your votes for my best photographs of 2025. You have until midnight! Again, please don’t send your votes to me by email, or post them in the comments, or they won’t be counted. Use the form at the bottom of my earlier post to cast your votes.
Thanks to everyone who already voted! I appreciate your help. 🙂
Tundra swans in fog, Sacramento Valley, California
Claudia and I feel lucky to have experienced many special moments this past year, including two mornings in the Sacramento Valley last month photographing tundra swans in the fog. I posted one of the swan images yesterday with my best-of-year nominees, but here are a few more. I had long wanted to photograph swans in fog – white on white, with elegant white birds against a white backdrop. It was wonderful to finally get that opportunity.
I hope these photographs feel peaceful. In reality, swans are often squabbling with each other. After every altercation, however, they flap their wings, shrug it off, and swim away, wrapped in serenity once again. They’re focused on the present, not the past, and the squabble is forgotten. That seems like a good lesson for us.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
Once again I’m inviting you, my faithful blog readers, to help me choose my best photographs from the past year. I’ve posted 52 of my favorite images from 2025 below, in chronological order. After you look through these, please use the form at the bottom of this post to list your ten favorites. The voting deadline is midnight Pacific Time, Monday, December 29th. Once the votes are in I’ll post the top ten or twelve on this blog.
(Voting has closed!)
As always, I reserve the right to override the votes if one of my favorites gets panned. But I’ve rarely had to exercise this power because my readers have excellent taste. 🙂
Thanks for your input — I appreciate your help!
A Landscape Photography Webinar
Moon rising above Half Dome from Tunnel View, Yosemite NP, California
Learn how to use simple, powerful tools to plan photos of the sun, moon, Milky Way, or any celestial object
We have powerful tools for photo planning at our fingertips – apps that allow us to predict where the sun or moon might rise or set in relation to the landscape, how the light will look at a given time and place, the position of the Milky Way above the land, and much more.
Unfortunately, many of these tools are excessively complicated, unintuitive, and difficult to learn. I know many photographers who have thrown up their hands and given up when faced with the dense complexity of these apps.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. In this new webinar I’ll show you how I use a few simple tools to precisely visualize the position of the sun, moon, Milky Way (or any celestial object) in relation to the landscape, and see how the light will change for any scene. We’ll delve into apps like PhotoPills, The Photographer’s Ephemeris, The Photographer’s Ephemeris 3D, and Planit Pro – but we’ll stick to the things you need to know, bypassing the extraneous stuff that only gets in the way.
I’ve been using Lightroom since Adobe released the beta version in 2006. Over the years I’ve learned many shortcuts, and in this video I share some of my favorite tips – things I use all the time to streamline my workflow:
