Happy Sunday! To welcome the new year, the Lens-Artists team has issued the annual challenge of reflecting on the previous year with some of our favorite photos.

I assure you, I’m not doing this backward but looking at the photos taken in the last 12 months, my eyes kept landing on this picture of the Grand Canyon I took in November. This photo is a panorama consists of two photos stitched in Lightroom. I’m sure I had my reasons of taking two almost identical photos at the time but cannot pull up that reason in my mind at this second.

Anyway, after spending the previous day looking at the Grand Canyon from a plane, the second day would be to look at the canyon from the normal tourist perspective. After spending the morning walking along the rim trail, I discovered we were slightly behind schedule if we were to make it the Horseshoe Bend by around 3 PM. This photo was taken at Grand View, a viewpoint I had never planned to stop. My plan was to head straight to the last viewpoint before exiting from the east exit.

I’ve never stopped at Grand View before, so I didn’t know what to expect. There was not a parking space in sight and when I almost gave up, my aunt suggested I parked along the road. “We better be quick,” I said as I had no desire to be issued a citation for illegally parking in the park. I walked ten paces ahead of my aunt as I was worried about my car. I certainly wasn’t expecting the view to be this grand and certainly didn’t expect to get one of my favorite photos at this spot.

In 2025, I probably took more photos with my phone than with my DSLR camera. It’s never my intention to replace my camera with my phone, it actually began as an experiment because I knew I had a trip planned in March and I didn’t want to lug my laptop with me on the trip. So I began taking photos on my phone and editing the RAW-uncompressed photo in the Lightroom app.

I was amazed at the clarity and resolution of the photos but given my phone has a 50 MP camera and my DSLR camera has only a 24 MP resolution, of course the images taken with the phone would be more clear than with a camera. I also love how easy it is to do street photography with my phone because I can just snap away without anyone noticing.

One thing I dislike about phone photography is the inability to zoom. I’ve been shopping around some clip-on lenses but so far, I haven’t found one that worked for everyone.

Here are my favorite wildlife photos of 2025 starting with a fox/coyote/wolf I spotted in the distance while I was trying to spot a bald eagle. It was too far away for me to tell which it was. Next, how about that squirrel? The zoom lens really comes in handy when trying to catch wildlife in the moment. I don’t think I could’ve taken these photos with my phone.

If I have a choose a favorite among the three, I will pick the dragonfly bugging my alyssum.

Lastly, my favorite travel photos!

After skipping travels for most of 2024, I traveled more in 2025 than probably any of the previous years. It was very hard for me to pick a favorite out of all the travels, so I picked two photos from each trip.