My Favorite Photos of the Year

Today’s Post by Mark Toal

At this time of year I like to look back at my favorite photographs from the past year. Social media sites like Facebook and Flickr make it very easy to find my best photos since that’s what I posted to these sites. My Meetup.com photo group set up an album for all the members to post their favorite photos so I had no excuse.

My favorite images from this year are all personal images, not travel or street scenes. The image of Lou Bachrach was taken at the very beginning of the year as his illness reached a point where hospice care was about to start. We were waiting to be seated at a restaurant in San Francisco when the sun came in an open door and lit his face. I quickly raised my Panasonic GM5 and took the shot. No fancy settings, just program mode with the 12-32mm kit lens.

The image of my mother was taken with my iPhone in the nursing home she had just moved to. I didn’t feel comfortable taking my camera into the nursing home and she didn’t like being photographed at this stage of her life.

The photo of the Rat Rod is from a personal project that I shot last summer. Watching Gary Fisher and his friends building this car over 28 days is one of the highlights of my year.