2025 was the second full year that I spent taking photos. It got me out of the house, calmed my mind, and introduced me to some new people. These are what I think are my best photos of the year.

• 23 photos I think are my best. Probably too many
• 11 of which are in color, 12 in monochrome
• primarily used the Film Pack from DXO for editing and finishing, and my favorites are:
  • Agfa UltraColor
  • Kodachrome + Ektachrome
  • Adox Silvermax
  • Agfa APX
  • Fuji Neopan Acros
• most used lens: Sigma 28-70 f/2.8 DG DN C (~2534 images)
• second most used lens: Zeiss Batis 2/25 (755 images)
• (that’s just counts for the number of raw files left on my hard drive–not necessary correlated to publication of photo)

Next year (this year)

I just watched Samuel Streetlife’s most recent video on shooting in monochrome in 2026, and decided to do the same. Most of my favorite images from the last year are in monochrome, and it sounds like a good challenge for me.

I’m not shooting with a monochrome sensor, so it’s not like I won’t use color if an image really will benefit from it, but my default assumption is going to be monochrome. I’ll only switch to color in the edit.

Goals

• publish a zine
• shoot monochrome
• write up my imager workflow, mostly for myself, but publish it here
• post at least 1 image to Flickr each month

SQL for pulling lens stats from digikam

Start the digikam sqlite db: % sqlite3 /path/to/digikam4.db and then run:

.mode csv
.headers on
.output ./lens-stats.csv

SELECT
    lens,
    COUNT(*) as count
FROM ImageMetadata
WHERE
    imageid in (
        SELECT id FROM Images images
        JOIN ImageInformation info on images.id = info.imageid
        WHERE info.creationDate >= '2025-01-01' AND info.creationDate < '2026-01-01'
    )
GROUP BY lens
ORDER BY count DESC;