Best Images of 2015

16 January 2016

I’ve taken a few hard moments and collected my favorite 10 images from all of 2015. My first pass yielded 101 images, and I pared it down from there over a couple hours.

Ten is a hard number when looking at a year of images. It leaves me with the feeling that I left out some aspects of my photography, but that’s part of the exercise — Which aspects are excelling? I exposed a sensor over 50k times, shared over 1800 shots on Facebook, and showed nearly 250 on Flickr. [1]

The Orb at Ardmore

orb

The Orb, the legendary ambient musicians, put on an amazing show near Philadelphia this year. I had my one speedlight as usual, and I happened to have tucked it into a stack of chairs behind a curtain on stage right. Right before The Orb took the stage, a publicist or someone came and asked that I limit my photographs to the first couple songs. I thought, "No problem." I knew I already had a light perfectly placed and ready to go, since I had freely shot the opening act.

DJ Uranko at Tellus 360

uranko

I was out to Tellus to see friends and they had a guest DJ, so I had some fun shooting as always. I like how excited and surprised people are to see images after an event like this. I spiced up the image a little by providing the crowd view on the projector screen to fill some space in the image. They really should project the crowd up there.

The Roar

roar

My friends at Shadowland keep the dance floor intense, and they always seem to appreciate seeing photos from the nights.

Playing with Fire in God’s Basement

fire

This year, I got brave and ventured out again to longer nights, like Big Dub out in the woods and God’s Basement Reunion outside Philadelphia. It was the first party in a newly reclaimed warehouse now called The Arts Garage: Waterfront.

Neon Kaleidscope

nk5

The Neon Kaleidoscope (previously Pure) crew celebrated 5 years in 2015. I had just seen an exhibition of Richard Avadon’s "Family Affair" series, so I knew I wanted to do a similar stitching to make a wide image to capture everyone at one of Neon Kaleidoscope’s biggest nights.

DJ Diesel

diesel

Jay and I have been splashing light around the Lizard Lounge for quite some time now.

Knobs and Switches

knobs

I’ve started working to photograph the gear and other environmental stuff from raves. I love the gesture in this image.

Nell at Lizard Lounge

nell

I shot many of my favorite images at Lizard Lounge this year. This image resulted from a quick collaboration with Nell Doll on a Neon Kaleidoscope night. This is when I started really carrying more gear into clubs.

Inside and Out

duplicity

I had the great opportunity to shoot with Marsha Denill in the same house with Brooke Shaden! The inspiration was strong this day, since I knew others would be making amazing images.

Fiesta

fiesta

I love photographing toys, and my bright green Ford Fiesta is my favorite car I’ve had, so it only makes sense for me to have a tiny replica of the car. I had wanted to shoot this image for a couple years.


1. Counting images for the year was fun: a shell script to rip through exif data for 2 cameras to find the image numbers for each raw image, rough counting of pages on Facebook, and clicking "Select All" on every day of images in 2015 on Flickr’s Camera Roll.


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January 2016