My Favorite Photos of 2015

My favorite photo of the year - the composition is well balanced

It's late December and time to pick my favorite pictures of 2015.  This year I had a very hard time editing my choices.  I realized that I liked some because of their content, or just because I remembered how beautiful it had been in 'real life'.  For instance, I really wanted to include one of the panoramics from my fall float hunt through the Refugium just because the colors had been so fantastic. It was without a doubt the prettiest place I was all year.  However, all of the photos I took were flawed for one reason or another.  Another picture that I still included but do not really like compositionally is the one of Nora on Afognak.  It's a great moment but somehow I did not really capture it perfectly.

To narrow down my options I decided to include pictures that 'told the story' or captured the moment.  Hence I include a float hunt picture with people in it - you can see that we are looking for animals and there are the canoes on the river.  Also Stuey playing hide in seek in the snowy woods with beautiful light - I like the photo because the viewer should know exactly what was going on.

On the flip side I also cut a bunch of really pretty pictures that somehow felt like cliches.  A lot of landscapes at dawn while on hunting trips had brilliant colors and showed spectacular views, but it felt like they were somehow all the same - cliches.   Same goes for mountains and spruce trees covered in snow - they reminded me of 'Hallmark Christmas cards'.

Anyway these are the ones I came up with along with a critique of each in the captions - enjoy!
Patrick

This one tells a story of a family hike through the woods and the exposure on Zoya just seems so perfect that I had to keep it

Green, green green and lots of details - I kept it because I seem to have caught everything in focus

A balanced and dramatic landscape that just happens to show the archaeological site where I excavated last summer

The composition is flawed but it is such a perfect moment that I had to keep it

Father and son meeting in the backcountry - good composition and a nice story

Whole lot of story to this one and a beautiful moment

Is this a cliche?  I like it and don't know why

This one might be cliche too - but I love the pink with yellow dots thing

My best artifact picture - this is a tiny microblade and they are very difficult to show off, and guess who found it?

This one captures hanging out by the stove on a hunting trip perfectly

Seeking out animals while floating through a spectacular place - one photo tells the whole story

Peekaboo - this is my second favorite photo

Another snow photo - ughhhh cliche (I dumped a bunch of mountains and snow) -  but I kept this one because you can feel the wind and approaching storm - something I rarely capture