It is once again that time of year when I, along with many other artists, reflect back upon the work from the previous year. I find it both useful and enjoyable to review my work and choose my favorite photographs from the year.

2015 was a very successful year for me creatively, I believe, as I continued advancing my previous two long-term projects (Pyrotechnic and Adventures in Celestial Mechanics) and also launched two new projects, Codex Natura and East of the Sun, West of the Moon. Given these four big projects, I found it satisfying to choose three images from each body of work to create my list of 12 favorite photographs of 2015.

As time goes on, other images may replace some of these in the end, but these are the images that tell the story of 2015.

I'm going to start with my Codex Natura project. This project has been extraordinarily fun as I seek out new material to use for the project and also continue to experiment with printing techniques for these very dark images. Besides the photograph leading off this post, my other two favorites are below - #15 is a brand new one, too:

I also continue to try to photograph each full moon from somewhere here in Maine for my Adventures in Celestial Mechanics project, though life and weather often conspire against me. This project has been changing for me as the photographs I'm taking are increasingly more abstract and subtle, like this one:

I should have qualified that subtle statement, as while most of the new work can be described that way, some of the new ones cannot. As you'll see below, the next two are a bit different...first up is the Blood Moon from September's lunar eclipse (a situation I've been trying to photograph for many years), and the Moon of the Ripening I from October is, well, pretty epic.

East of the Sun, West of the Moon is my other new project and I'm very excited about it as well. The challenges of these dark color images as well as the circular format have been pretty invigorating. Here are my three favorites, so far, from this new project:

...and last but not least we have my Pyrotechnic project. I continue to haunt local public firework shows seeking out new images. Here are my three favorites from 2015:

For those of you who made it all the way to the end, I'm also including a sneak peek at some of my Arizona/Southwest images from my fall artist residency. I'm still working through the very large pile of images, but these are some early ones that I find promising.

Chiricahua National Monument - Dark skies are one of the main attractions of SE Arizona, and they did not disappoint.

Chiricahua National Monument. I spent many days making photographs along the lines of this one -- I definitely think it has potential for a project.

White Sands National Monument. I'm not sure if this photograph is a keeper, but the many-colored reflections from the sand (mica) there if you got just at the right angle made one of my favorite sights I've ever seen.

Favorites of 2015

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