• 14 Dec, 2025 *

Inspired by various online photo communities, including 35mmc and DPReview, I decided to join in the fun and talk about my favorite photos I’ve taken this year. Since I used three cameras in 2025, I’ll post a photo from each, then explain why this particular picture deserves merit.

Favorite iPhone photo of 2025

There may be some recency bias going on with my selections, but whatever. For my iPhone, my favorite photo was one taken of L. during our tour of the Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark in Birmingham, AL. Clicking on any of the below photos will take you to its corresponding entry on Glass:

I quickly picked up on the symmetry of the overhead girders, and how that particular shade of orange was reminiscent of the vermillion used on Torii gates at Shinto shrines in Japan. The outfit L. wore that day just so happened to illustrate complementary color theory, though in this case nothing was being canceled out. For technical details, I used the Project Indigo app to take this photo, which I think did a better job capturing the intensity of the orange that’s throughout the site. Seriously, this shade of orange is everywhere, so if you happen to visit Birmingham, try to visit Sloss Furnaces on a sunny or slightly cloudy day.

Favorite Sony photo of 2025

This was my toughest category to fulfill1. As I have mentioned before, I don’t enjoy using the Sony a7 II camera as much as my iPhone or the Canon rangefinder. I find it to be bulky and obtrusive in ways the other cameras aren’t. In my opinion, the only advantage the Sony has over my other cameras is the all-in-one zoom lens I’ve more or less permanently attached to it. Even if you were to factor in the Sony’s larger camera sensor over the iPhone, the latter’s convenient sizing and the boost provided by the OS makes its photos "good enough" for me.

The above aside, I was able to find one good photo with the Sony. Back in May 2025, L. and I made a trip to Chicago over Memorial Day weekend to see family and attend a book tour event from Craig Mod. Since the bookstore hosting the event was in Evanston, we stayed a nearby hotel that put us only a couple miles away from the Bahá’í Temple in Wilmette. Being able to see this building on a sunny day is something special, so I used all three of my cameras to capture scenes here. I used the zoom on some of the intricate exterior details, but this photo is the one that stood out to me. It captures the symmetry and the details of the exterior, along with a hint as to how the building’s presence comes across when you see it:

Favorite film photo of 2025

Surprise! There are two photos here: one color, one black-and-white. My recency bias is showing again here, as they were both taken in November.

First up is the black-and-white photo from the National Museum of Transportation in unincorporated Kirkwood, MO. L. and I attended on what we thought would be one of the final brilliant displays of autumn foliage. Seeing the trains juxtaposed against the trees in the midst of fall would make for great visuals, camera or no camera. I had loaded some Adox HD-50 in the Canon a few days before our visit, and based on how the below photo turned out, I may have to use this film2 in the future. In many ways, the results are what I wanted, even if the Canon’s built-in light meter leads to a slight overexposure: the blacks are BLACK, which in my mind is what I want for black-and-white photography.

The color photo is from the Alabama trip, taken a few hours before the visit to Birmingham and the Sloss Furnaces. Near our hotel in Childersburg is one of 11 covered bridges left in Alabama, and one of six still in its same location. The Kymulga Covered Bridge is one part of a working grist mill, so in this photo I captured one of the men about to ride over the bridge on his lawn tractor. There were still a fair amount of trees on these grounds in autumn foliage, so I deliberately framed the branch within the opening of the bridge to highlight both the leaves and the overhead lights within the bridge itself.

Favorite photo of 2025?

If I had to pick from the four listed above, I’d put them in this order:

1. Covered bridge photo (film, color).
2. Train photo (film, black-and-white).
3. Modern torii gates (iPhone).
4. Temple steps (Sony).

There wouldn’t be a big gap between 2 and 3, so maybe they’d be 2A and 2B, respectively. Congratulations to the covered bridge picture for being my best photo of 2025!

I have a feeling that the Sony category will be a one-and-done affair, but that will depend on how well I like my upcoming camera purchase. Time will tell.↩ 1.

The Adox HR-50 is effectively the same film as the Leica Monopan 50, so if the former is hard to buy, the latter should be easier.↩

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