Happy New Year!
I’m back, after taking a couple of weeks off. I did nothing except eat, rest, visit with friends and family and of course, take lots of iPhone photos. 🙂 I also reflected on the past year and all the photography that filled my days in 2025. Most days were for work, some were personal projects, and a lot of it was on-the-go impromptu shoots with my iPhone.
Some photography work projects are hard. They involve a lot of planning, physical and emotional energy, but also complex technical set ups that feel a bit risky. It’s work, but it’s deeply satisfying work. It’s creative and challenging, and it constantly feels like character building.
I love it.
With every completed project, my passion for photography grows. I’m grateful that I get to fill my weekly 40 hours with something I already do for fun on my days off.
And on top of it all, I get to write about photography to you, in my weekly e-mail.
My e-mail list has quietly grown over the last 2 years. It’s not growing by leaps and bounds, but by a handful of new subscribers every week. I don’t hear from many of you, but I also have a very low unsubscribe rate and a high open rate. This tells me that most of you are likely enjoying this newsletter. Hopefully you’re getting a bit more creative and a bit more skilled in photography because of it!
So as I reflect back on 2025, I thought I’d share a monthly highlight from my iPhone camera roll, beginning in January 2025.
I’ll also include notes on why I like the photo and how I could have improved it:
January 2025
|
|
Why I like this photo: I love when a sky gives me a bright sun and dramatic clouds. Whenever possible, I like using that as my backdrop. It turns a simple outdoor photo into something that’s a lot more eye-catching. Dramatic skies command attention.
How it can be improved: I don’t like that there is a pole standing on top of the person’s head. It’s creating too much vertical weight on one side of the image, while the left side the of the image has a lot of blank, empty space. A better composition would have the person fill more the left side of the frame, away from the vertical poles on the right side.
February 2025
|
|
Why I like this photo: It’s giving so much festive vibe! If you’re from Manitoba, you know how big Festival du Voyageur is every February. And this photo embodies the joy and excitement of this winter festival we winter-tired folks all look forward to. The ceinture fléchée wraps around the main subject (the coffee cup) and adds movement and playfulness.
How it can be improved: I wish I would have cropped out the top background distractions. The sound system, stage gates and sound technician are not adding much to the photo. Either I’d want to see more of those things or just none of it at all.
March 2025
|
|
Why I like this photo: I love taking photos of ice and how it reflects light and creates shape out of something near-invisible (water).
But honestly, I struggled to find a highlight photo from March. I didn’t spend much time taking iPhone photos that month so I had few to choose from for this post.
How it can be improved: There is too much negative space and the dark wood is distracting. I should have found a way to fill the frame with more of the ice. This photo needed more time to play with angles and perspectives to fix it.
April 2025
|
|
Why I like this photo: The play with lines! The vertical trees are framing the scene in such a beautiful, symmetrical way and the leading lines (the path) help the eye to see the story, take in the scene, and imagine what’s at the end of this path. Lots of fun stuff to look at in this image.
How it can be improved: This is obvious. Adding a person on the bright spot on the path! Our eye just wants to see someone walking or cycling down the path, away from the camera. Right??
May 2025
|
|
Why I like this photo: For a change, there are people in my photos! With my iPhone, it’s rare that I get my subjects to sign release forms. This limits what I can and cannot post online, and often that means not ever sharing some of my favourite iPhone portraits with you.
So when I do get the chance to share iPhone photos with people in it, I get excited. (unrecognizable faces for the win!)
In this snapshot of people walking around downtown, each with their own story and their own destination, it leaves us to wonder where their day began or where it will end. I love capturing brief moments in time and leaving the viewer to imagine what happened before or after this fraction in time was captured.
How it can be improved: Compelling street photography gets up close. Seeing their facial expressions would add so much more emotion to the photo. It would also spark more of our imaginations about their stories.
June 2025
|
|
Why I like this photo: I broke the rule of thirds. I’ll just leave it at that. 😉
How it can be improved: I would crop about an inch off the bottom of the image so that the flower is centered vertically. Right now, the flower sits a bit too high in the frame.
July 2025
|
|
Why I like this photo: The shapes, colours and textures of the frog are mimicked in the rest of the image, and this repetition is intriguing to me. It’s not just a photo of a frog, but of an animal that is reflecting characteristics of its environment. There’s so much symbolism to contemplate, and I love how a simple image can inspire philosophical rumination.
How it can be improved: This image is a bit off from a perfect rule of thirds. Either you break the rule or you follow it cleanly. And I did neither. Oops!
August 2025
|
|
Why I like this photo:The contrast between the large sun appearing small and the small water bubbles appearing large is what makes this photo intriguing to me. Flip proportions on their head, and you immediately create an image worth studying.
How it can be improved: The crooked horizon is just slightly off. Again: either make it really crooked or make it perfectly level. Doing neither makes this image a little aggravating to look at for a long time.
September 2025
|
|
Why I like this photo: I’m fascinated by the ever-changing shapes of clouds. They continue to display various designs, without any interference by us humans on earth. This image shows a particularly interesting cloud day, and although this is the easiest photo to take, it’s one of the most profound to study.
How it can be improved: The editing needs a bit of fine tuning to balance the saturation and contrast. Some of it looks a touch artificial, in my opinion.
October 2025
|
|
Why I like this photo: This flower (taken at the Leaf, Winnipeg’s indoor tropical garden) has so many unusual colours, shapes and textures. It’s unlike anything we’d see outside in Manitoba in October, and this is the simple reason why I like this photo.
How it can be improved: There is a lot of heavy blackness in the bottom right and it’s dragging the photo down. I need to either brighten up that area or remove it to make this a more balanced photo.
November 2025
|
|
Why I like this photo: The Northern Lights may be the most spectacular and elusive phenomenon in the night sky, so when my iPhone manages to capture this much colour and detail, it easily becomes one of my favourite iPhone photos of the year.
How it can be improved: Don’t get me started on the quality of this photo. If I had my fancy Nikon camera and higher quality lenses, this photo would look better, not only on a screen but in print too. But at the end of the day, this photo was more about just capturing the Northern Lights, and not about getting it perfectly well.
December 2025
|
|
Why I like this photo: The subject is so unusual and other-worldly that it makes us take a double-look. What is this? Where was this photo taken? How was this photo taken? When a photo creates more questions than answers, it’s doing something right.
How it can be improved: Identifying a clear subject or point of focus will make this photo better. Unfortunately, there is no clear way of knowing what the central subject of the photo is. Locating and highlighting an unusual element in the midst of these repeating ice patterns would help ground this photo. Unfortunately, my hands were cold, my camera was having a hard time locking focus in macro mode, and I ran out of patience (and time) to really find a clear subject.
And that’s a wrap on 2025 photos from my iPhone!
I look forward to many more opportunities to capture the wonder, beauty and quirkiness of our world through my lens.
|
|
