Our favorite photos we shot in 2022

Chris Niccolls

If you’ve watched DPReviewTV or perused any of the sample galleries on dpreview.com you have seen pictures of my daughter Maddie. Normally she loves to pose for the camera, some days more than others. And I’m so grateful that she still lets me take pictures of her.

However, my favorite picture of 2022 was a completely un-posed portrait of her. Leaning seemingly exhausted across the chair, looking out into the backyard. The light from the window was large and soft in nature. Often with young children it’s difficult to get honest and candid moments out of them. I knew this was one of those moments.

I shot this on the Leica M11, a camera which I had the good fortune to street-shoot with in New York City. A Leica rangefinder on the streets of NYC is one of those classic situations that one dreams about, and I liked many of the shots from that trip. And yet my favorite shot of the year was a simple one taken in the living room on a lazy Sunday.

Jason Hendardy

In my personal photography practice I’m drawn to photographing serendipitous moments, but since my recent move to Seattle I’ve had to reframe my approach to finding them. Instead of heading to more populated areas, such as downtown, which I would normally do, I’ve started to explore what’s happening within my own neighborhood and other more residential areas. On most days I head out with no destination in mind and hope to come across something that catches my attention. This also means that there are days where I may see nothing.

Then there are days like the one that gave me this photograph. The sun was going down, pushing me to find something so I didn’t go home empty-handed, and at the last moments of light things fell into place. A kid is providing an action and the home owner is open to a candid photograph – the result depicts life, imperfections and all. I look back at photographs like these that I’ve taken and they make the hours upon hours of blind roaming worth it.

Dale Baskin

I’ve had the opportunity to photograph a lot of things, but I’m not sure any of them prepared me for what it takes to shoot rodeo. Rodeo is a tradition in the American west, and it’s a place where big skies, cowboys and adventure come together to celebrate cowboy culture. So, when I had a chance to spend three days photographing the Flathead River Rodeo in Polson, Montana, I went all in.

When shooting rodeo, you need to pay attention to what’s going on around you. It’s one of the few sports where the athletes (i.e., the bulls) will seriously hurt you if you’re in the wrong place or not paying attention. And here I like to get close to my subjects. So I staked out a spot on the elevated platform right next to the chutes where competitors mount their rides. In the photo above, a cowboy struggles to control a bronco seconds before the gates swing open, launching him into the arena.

I expected rodeo to be a challenge, but I didn’t expect it to be one of the most adrenaline-pumping photography experiences I’ve ever had. I’ll be back for more.

Matt Waller

One of the things I don’t do as a street photographer is photograph the homeless. I know some photographers who do, who engage with them personally and enter into their lives and communities; I admire both them and the meaningful photos they produce. But for me, the casual street shooter extraordinaire who grabs a few shots on his daily commute, I shy from exploiting their tragedy for my own aesthetic purposes.

Still, in Seattle in 2022 homelessness is an ever-present problem and an unavoidable aspect of the downtown streets I walk.

I took this exceptional-for-me shot instinctively, simply because of the unusual wrap over the man’s head. Only later did I realize I had captured something emblematic of issues hidden in plain sight, and the human cost of invisibility.

Josh Hays

These days, my camera often comes out only when I am travelling somewhere. This year I was fortunate to have the opportunity to visit a hidden oasis of paradise off of a barely-maintained, rocky road in Mexico. It’s a stopover for many animals, including a wide variety of birds – I counted at least twenty species among the images I brought home.

I never really considered myself a ‘bird photographer,’ but looking back over the photos from that trip, as well as others in the past, I’ve found that many of my favorite images feature birds. They’re wonderful subjects: beautiful, highly detailed, endlessly varied. And it’s always satisfying to capture a perfectly-focused image of a fast-moving bird in flight, revealing details difficult or impossible to see with the eye alone.

This hooded oriole wasn’t flying, but when I saw its backlit head pop out from behind a cactus, I knew I had only a second to get the shot before it was gone. Peek-a-boo!

Jordan Drake

When the opportunity arose to spend 24 hours with the new Hasselblad X2D 100C, I jumped at the chance. In my one evening with the camera I went out to Elbow Falls for some sunset photos and was thrilled when my son Liam wanted to come with me.

Unfortunately, the light was terrible and it was freezing cold. Liam endured the conditions and agreed to model for a few pictures. In this shot, the Hasselblad was struggling to acquire focus for several seconds and Liam was unable to suppress a yawn. At that exact moment the camera’s focus hit, and I was rewarded with this photo that perfectly captured my feelings about the X2D’s autofocus performance.

Brendan Nystedt

2022 was a good year for my photography on the whole. I relocated to a new city in a new State, which meant that there was plenty to explore and see. After letting my shutter muscles atrophy during the early pandemic, the new sights, new locations, new light and new weather were exactly what I needed to get out there and shoot.

The shot I picked as my favorite is something I captured while on a walk with some other photographers. It’s a shot that reminds me how much of the art is dependent on pure serendipity. If we had come on another day, the ATM wouldn’t have been smashed or the light would have been different. But this moment came together organically, unplanned, spontaneously. As much as we like to fret about sharpness, battery life, megapixel count, autofocus algorithms and other speeds and feeds, sometimes the universe hands you something. All the technology in the world won’t help unless you let that moment happen to you.

Richard Butler

I’m not sure this is my best photo from the year – I think some of the portraits of the people I met on the High Line, having finally been able to get back to New York, were better – but this is the one that’s stayed with me.

It’s impossible for me to separate the photo from my memory of taking it, which is presumably why the concept of ‘Kodak moments’ was such a powerful marketing message.

It was taken as a friend and I waited for our respective trains after an evening out in Bristol. An enjoyable time with someone I don’t see as often as I’d like had come to an end, and we waited for the services that would take us in opposite directions. It was an evening near the end of my trip to the UK and the prospect of having to leave, with there being no certainty over when I’d next be back, was beginning to bear down on me.

For me, it’s a photo about the sense of isolation that comes as you realize that you can only now be a visitor to somewhere that was once home.

Of course very little of that is actually in the photo; it’s just a solitary figure, waiting on a platform. But perhaps with this background, you might catch a glimpse of what I see in it, and understand why this is the shot that keeps coming back to me.

Shaminder Dulai

2022 was a transition year in my photography. Just before the start of the pandemic I had moved across the country; normally, I would have walked through the city with my camera, seeing the mundane in a new light, excited and inspired by the newness. Instead, the only jaunts I was taking were around a shoebox apartment. I felt isolated, alone and like a stranger in a strange land.

I’ll spare you the platitudes about ‘our new normal’ – we changed over these past years. For me, this was a year of slowly coming out of the cocoon and rediscovering why I fell in love with photography the first time. In 2022 I started to talk to strangers again, I started to walk the streets with a camera again, I travelled again and started to really see other people again.

This image, from a trip to Reykjavik, Iceland, reminds me of why photography resonates, not just for me as a photojournalist interested in capturing the first draft of history, but in the universal sense of committing to an image a memory. Here, the memory of two people sharing a moment on a street corner for a selfie in a winter storm became a collision of layers and light with an exploration of humanity at the core. To me it’s a reminder of how much I missed really ‘seeing’ and how ready I was to dive back in.

In some ways, what I do could be reduced to: this is what I saw, this is what I cared about and ultimately, this is proof I existed.

Gannon Burgett

Okay, so maybe I’m cheating by using a diptych, but my favorite image of the year is actually two: a pair of photographs of my children¹.

Working from home with two children running around is no easy feat, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Every day, I am grateful to be able to watch the two of them grow more into their personalities, better revealing the incredible humans I believe they’re destined to be (although I’m certainly biased). Lorelai, on the left, is a fearless explorer, unapologetic in who she is and willing to take on the world in front of her. Endeavour, on the right, is inquisitive and forever yearning to know more about every bit of the world around him.

To me, these images perfectly encapsulate their personalities and are photographs I know I’ll look back at with a smile in the decades to come. They’re not technically perfect, nor captured with the latest gear. In fact, the photos were shot on Fujifilm Acros II film that ended up being pushed two stops because I forgot to adjust the ISO dial after letting Lorelai play with my Nikon FG camera. But what the images lack in pixel perfection, they make up for in capturing the personalities of two of my three favorite people in this world (my spouse being the third).

¹ I’ve made it a point to never show their faces online until they’re old enough to give me permission, so obscure profiles it is.