Here are my top 10 personal favorite photos from 2023. In no particular order.

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I’ve already shown most of these photographs earlier this year, but that’s how I do things. Photos are meant to be seen.

I hope you enjoy them.

I converted many of my Ghost Town photos to black & white to give them more of an abstract feeling and to remove the sense of time. What I like about this photo is the semi truck moving past on the highway in the background. Life moves on from the past.

 

Another Ghost Town photograph from this past summer. Many of these ghost towns have become junk storage locations for the people who own the property. The junk in the back of this trailer is a snapshot of their past.

 

A more recent photograph, made when my friend Ricky and I traveled out to see the radio telescope one evening in December. The color of the sky at twilight gave this scene a very surrealistic and appropriate feel.

 

Made during my annual trip to Monte Vista, Co to photograph Sandhill Cranes. This photo was taken at Alamosa National Wildlife Refuge, near Alamosa, Colorado. I was cruising through the refuge looking for wildlife and this was the scene in the distance. Not much in the way of wildlife that morning, but this image of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the early morning was exceptional.

 

I found this moose in a pond near my cabin one spring morning while making my morning wildlife photography rounds in Red Feather Lakes. The moose are pretty scruffy this time of year and I was fortunate to catch him getting a drink of water while a couple of Canada Geese swam by.

 

Made in early December at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico. We had fleeting glances of these animals earlier, mostly along roadsides but never actually caught them out in the open. We tried to find them at the blind area, but no joy. Finally, we passed a whole family of Javelina just off the road near a stream. They gave us what we were looking for. A first for me, I’d never seen these animals in the wild before, so getting photos this close was most excellent.

 

This was a lucky encounter one autumn morning. There were two white-tailed bucks in the brush near me, neither giving me a good presentation. This one moved a bit and for a few brief moments, I had an angle on him.

 

I managed a few trips to photograph the bighorn sheep along the front range. Here’s my favorite image of a bighorn ram running at full speed in the snow.

Autumn color was in full swing near Crested Butte, Co when Jonathan Steele and I made a drive over Kebler Pass back in October. The day after I made this photo I came down with COVID and we had to abandon the trip. Still, I really like this image and was happy to come out of the trip with something.

 

Here’s a photo I made one morning in March, before sunrise, at Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge. The cranes were waking up and beginning to fly out of their overnight roosting pond. This shot was a challenge though. It was very cold and it was quite dark. By the sun rises above the mountains to the east, most of these cranes will be gone so one doesn’t have a lot of time nor good light to get this shot.

All things considered, I am pretty happy with the photographs I was able to make this past year.  I wasn’t as productive as I have been in years past, but I haven’t lost a step with the quality of images I’m creating.