Favourite twelve images for 2025

After bailing out last year - for reasons I forget - I decided to do another top X images this year and I've been extra generous to myself and chosen a 'top' twelve for the year! It's always fun to do this and I actually found making the choices reasonably easy. I've not gone for one a month, as output was not exactly prolific in some parts of the year. However, I have restricted myself to having no more than one image from any particular trip. I hope you enjoy them!

The first image is from a lovely little cold snap in the second half of January and some extraordinarly beautiful icy swirls that formed on the side of our greenhouse. I've seen plenty of fun ice patterns on glass windows over the years but these were in another league! I dashed inside to get my tripod and camera with long lens and had a fun half hour or so creating little rectangles and squares from sections of the greenhouse glass. I rather regretted not having cleaned the glass before winter set in and had to work hard to find reasonably clean patches. It was a blue sky day and some lovely translucent light but also some shade and the beautiful cool blues that come with that combination. A telephoto lens was essential so I could keep my distance and avoid seeing myself in the glass!

My next image was from another nice cold snap in February, although this ditch was not frozen over - thankfully, as the surface water is a crucial ingredient here. My first visit for many, many years to Skipwith Common (near York) and these decaying leaves in a somewhat sulphurous and stinky ditch were too beautiful to ignore. I had to lean over precariosuly and hope I didn't fall in, trying to get my camera and lens parallel to the water, whilst avoiding reflections of myself. Not easy, but I managed to find a few decent compositions and this is possibly my favourite. I love the muted colours and strong textures, with the light reflecting off the water's surface - possibly a tiny bit of polarisation could have been beneficial, but I had no filters with me.

This is from our Harris & Lewis workshop in March and a beautiful last dawn shoot on Traigh Iar. There was a bit of surf to play with and, whilst it was overcast much of the morning, some super light worked its way through the clouds every now and then, here bathing Taransay in warm, golden light. It's a bit more punchy and colourful than much of my work from Harris, but such is the intensity you can enjoy when the sun does break through on a cloudier day.

Most of our lovely group on Harris & Lewis, many from overseas, then joined us for a few days on the mainland and we enjoyed a slight sprinkling of snow on the tops of the Torridonian mountains. Those of you who know the area may recognise this as Beinn Eighe - here reflected in the shallow waters at the edge of Loch Clair. For me, these kind of abstracted reflection images need a little bit of an extra ingredient to retain my interest - the surface grasses (on which I focussed) do just that.

I had a quick turnaround after our double bill in Scotland and Rob and I headed off to Norway in late March for our annual week of cross country skiing in Rondane National Park. The landscape there is majestic, but conditions were not their best this year and I only took a handful of photos - this my clear favourite, near the start of a long day skiing into the mountains.

We had an all too brief visit to Deeside at the start of May and visited a little area I hadn't managed to explore last time we were there. We had a reasonably long and rushed evening walk (more of a route march to be fair!) and there were some beautifully gnarled birch trees just coming into leaf. I loved the relationship between the two main protagonists here - it's amazing how often birch trees seem to be gesturing towards each other. I was only handholding so thank goodness for the capabilities of higher ISO and noise reduction.

I love the fresh greens of springtime but, unusually for me, I found myself opting for black and white for these young fern fronds along a river bank, closer to home, and later that month. They do work well in colour but somehow the high-key, monochrome treatment feels right and really emphasises their delicate form.

None of my summertime images have made it into my top twelve, although there were very few to choose from this year, with so much hot, dry weather. So I've skipped a few months to September and now include an image from a lovely few days in Sweden, where I was honoured to be talking at the Nature Photo Festival in Surahammar. It was a super event and included a guided walk in a beautiful old forest nearby. It was somewhat wet - perfect conditions for woodland photography.

October is always such a busy time for photography and this year, as has been the case for the last 10 years, we were on Harris & Lewis for our regular workshop earlier in the month. Conditions were mostly quite muted, with not a lot of drama to be had, but plenty of Harris's signature moody blues. We arrived just after Stormy Amy left, and some fabulous 'new' boulders had been deposited on a favourite rocky shoreline. The power of the sea never ceases to amaze me.

I stopped off in the Cairngorms again on my way home, spending a couple of days walking and photographing - a lot! Tiring stuff but colours were stunning and I would love to have spent longer there. This focus stacked image is one of my favourite from the whole year, I think - I love the tunnel effect and almost feel I'm looking into a kaleidoscope. I wasn't sure the software (Zerene) would be able to stack such a madly chaotic image but it's done an incredible job and I was really thrilled this one worked out. If you're wondering, why bother - simply because a focal length of 127mm, even at f/16, was only going to give me a slither of leaves and branches in focus - that was not what I could see, nor what was in my head, so this was the only way I could achieve this kind of image.

A week at home and then off to Greece for our annual workshop there. As you can probably see, colours were fantastic there too! I could choose any number of images from that week but opted for this because it's a bit different from many of my images from there and I love the colour and texture contrasts of the warm autumnal leaves and the cool, hard rock, all gently illuminated by a sun that was about to rise above the horizon.

I know I only said one image per trip, but Rob and I spent another week in Greece after the workshop ended, so I'm calling it a separate trip! We had intended to go high into the mountains but the weather had other ideas and, despite managing a couple of big walks earlier on, a succession of wet storms meant we then had to stay relatively low. The amount of rain that fell was crazy but it did mean we saw water in the rivers again and had a chance to revisit a few old haunts from our first visit in 2010, as well as discover a few new places. This, my final image, is one of the results - it was absolutly pouring down at the time, wet enough to make operating a little tricky but oh, so worth it...