Your favorite three images from the past year?

[lindsayb]

Hmmm, this was an interesting exercise as I could see how much I really began to improve when I got my new camera. There's been so much going on for us this year that I never got around to sharing my excitement, but I upgraded from my poor beat up Pentax K100D to a Nikon D7000, skipped the kit lens and got myself a Tamron 28-75mm 2.8 lens. Spent a good deal of time getting to know my new camera and figuring out the focusing. The tamron lens isn't stabilized so it's forcing me to think more and use better technique. Though I will opt for stabilized lenses later as I want to shoot families and experience shooting my 4 year tells me that little extra will definitely help when they are on the move!

In any case, here are my three picks out of a dozen or so:

My daughter was diagnosed with autism this year and she's always been hard to get good pictures of unless they are candid:


Love this of my many botanical images for the luscious petals and lovely bokeh:


We had the fortune of spending holidays on the Isle of Arran. Amazing place!! So many more photos from there I'll share, but here's one fav:

[Marko]

such a wonderful thread! Lovely to see everyone's choices.

I always have trouble with threads like this...but after I process a few images from last week (I think I have 1 fave from that lot), I'll try to remember to post them.

[tomoscott]

That Polar Bear Jumper is terrific!

[Mike Bons]

These are not necessarily my best images of 2013, but they are among my favorites and I will do my best to describe why.

This image although maybe not the most dynamic image I got of bluebirds this year, it was the culmination of our efforts that started in early April. I told my wife that my son and I were off to the hardware store to buy some lumbar to build a bluebird box. Her response was "Mike, that's a waste of time. We never see bluebirds around here". To which I replied, "if nothing else, it will be a good time building it with Grayden (my 3 year old son)." Well later that month we would see the bluebirds move into the box and subsequently go on to have 2 broods, to which we fed over 60,000 live mealworms to. This image is from the first brood in which there was 5. I was only able to get 1 image with all 5 juveniles in it as well as the mother.



This image is one of my favorite landscape images from the year. It was taken in Ft. Myers Beach where we went on a family vacation at the end of October. I'm not a fan of the commercialism of Orlando but this, Southwest area, of Florida is beautiful. Every morning I would walk down to the beach and take pictures of shorebirds and often had dolphins swimming past me.



I took so many pictures of my youngest child Walker who was born this year it is hard to pick a fav. However this picture of him just minutes after his birth with him laying on my wife's chest, so exhausted by the childbirth but so content in the moment, was very special for me.