End of 2025

2025 has been pretty good when it comes to my photography. Quite a few nice pictures abroad (featured in earlier blogs) but a lot of good work from my surrounding area aswell. Moving house has provided me with new areas to work with and experiment with. This came with challenges, but mainly with enjoyment. Being able to go somewhere on the weekends and working on a few images seeing no other people is something I couldn't imagine before, but I've been able to enjoy it quite a bit this year. I've also developed stylistically a fair bit, which was hard at times (getting different/creative images wasn't always easy and sometimes demoralizing). Despite the difficulties, I've got a lot of images I'm happy with and a nice variation of results to show for it. In this blog I round up all of the images that didn't get featured yet, but are worth showing. A good amount of images, so a fairly long blog where I'll keep the text short and sweet, grab a drink and enjoy :)

Winter started of very slow, lots of work to be done on the house, actually moving into it and the fact that winter doesn't exactly provide a lot of opportunities (except for snow and frost, of which we got very little). So just a few images and then immediately onto spring.

Spring was great. Herpetological highlights are far more abundant in my new living area, so we started of the year with a succesful search for Spadefoot toads (without good images). A crested newt and European treefrog proved more cooperative. Birds proved cooperative subjects as well, getting an image of a blackcap I really enjoy, although others may prefer a more clean image. The biggest highlight in spring were a few evenings spent with badgers, but they have had their own blog already. Still a fair bit of work on the house, but the end was slowly coming into view, so time for outings increased.

Early summer I started to have a good amount of time to spend outside again, so the number of images started to increase aswell. Birds, dragonflies and butterflies were the main subjects. First of; Alcon blues (a new species for me, but very shy and hard to photograph) and more cooperative silver studded blues, as well as red backed shrikes from a local area I've grown to absolutely adore already. Very few people, pretty landscapes, being allowed of the paths and incredibly diverse vegetation and wildlife make for an area worth visiting over and over again.

I spent a fair bit of time photographing beautiful demoiselles, treating them as a sort of project, getting as diverse a set of images as I could. There's still plenty to be done, but a good start so far. Something to continue next year, as I've got quite a few more images in mind I didn't get around to. I spent a fair bit of time messing around with extreme close-ups, which might not be for everyone, but I had fun taking them and am fond of the results, which is honestly all that should really matter :)

After failing to find them on the first attempt, a second evening outing spent photographing banded darters was more succesful, the sunset light allowing for a couple nice images

A grab bag of other local images (mostly, 2 of these were in the Wieden), the stork on the nest being probably my favorite shot of the year. The clean lines, graphic look because of the high key approach, the pose of the stork being reflected in the shape of the branches and red beak providing a small pop of color just works in my eyes. The only thing to improve was the youngsters pose, but alas. Some pretty succesful landscape work included aswell, which I have been gravitating towards on the beautiful mornings, as it's far less stressful than looking for wildlife to use these landscapes.

Autumn eventually rolled around. I spent time on mushrooms (quite succesfully, although in the moment I wasn't always feeling inspired), landscapes and a couple of bird shots. A few landscapes from a trip to the Ardennes are included aswell, as these didn't get their own blog. Favorites include the magpie inkcap and the image of the springtail on the underside of a bolete.

And then onto the start of winter. I think I've seen more frosty mornings so far than all of last winter, probably because of moving inland and slightly north. As I'm writing this a thin blanket of snow is melting outside, calling me to go back out again (the entire morning was spent outside already, but those images will follow later, maybe in next years end of year blog). Frosty mornings were spent on landscapes and frozen mushrooms. The sparce sunny moments of free time were spent photographing garden birds and starlings. The results of the images of birds in flight against the light I'm especially fond of, so I've featured those first up here. I also got lucky with a snow bunting being fairly cooperative, so those images are included aswell. I have high hopes for next year, best wishes to you all and may there be plenty more beauty in natures bounty to follow.