Nikon Z8 with Nikkor Z 24-120mm f/4 S at 83mm, 1/400 sec, f/8, ISO 110.
This post is not just the last of Leadville, it is the last of 2025. It is the completion of three years of weekly blog posts, which does seem like an accomplishment and a good time for some reflection. I hope that all of you who subscribe enjoy receiving them each week in your inbox. I’m under no illusions—well, maybe I should say few illusions—about how many people usually read them in full, but that’s okay. The biggest reason that my interest in photography waned in the pre-digital era is that there was no good way to share my photographs with anyone. Heck, it was difficult to even share them with myself! So I am grateful for everyone who looks at them and enjoys them. And even more grateful for those of you who comment on them.
Nikon Z8 with Nikkor Z 24-120mm f/4 S at 55mm, 1/250 sec, f/9.5, ISO 500.
The other big benefit for me is that it forces motivates me work through my photographs and do something with some of them. Even so, I still blunder into unexplored wildernesses in my Lightroom catalog. This weekly blog is, at some level, a narrative: usually it is a somewhat tape-delayed summary of my travels and the images that I made along the way. Like any reasonable narrative, it needs a flow. Hopefully, like any good narrative, I successfully sprinkle in a few surprises and flashbacks, too, in a way that enhances rather than disrupts the storyline. Another benefit of this blog, for me, is that it helps me understand my own photography: it helps me see when it is getting repetitive and it helps me notice things that are a little (or a lot) different and need to be pursued. Each post is an opportunity for reflection. In the end, I hope to strike a middle ground where it avoids boredom on one side and chaos on the other, since I doubt either would be of much interest to me or to you.
Nikon Z8 with Nikkor Z 24-120mm f/4 S at 24mm, 1/180 sec, f/9.5, ISO 500.
So, the 52 posts of 2025 consisted of, in order:
- 6 posts on England (following 3 more at the end of 2024)
- 8 posts on Belgium
- 5 posts on Colorado
- 10 posts on Alabama (plus one from each of Arizona and Colorado mixed in)
- 8 posts on Yorkshire Dales
- 3 more posts on Alabama
- 3 posts on Wyoming
- 4 posts on Michigan
- 3 posts on Colorado (including this one, making a total of 9 on the year)
Nikon Z8 with Nikkor Z 24-120mm f/4 S at 36mm, 1/500 sec, f/9.5, ISO 500.
At some level, the big trips make planning the blog easy because I know there will be a big block of posts to go with each them. But then the challenge is trying to figure out how to best organize and break up a big trip with 2,000 or 3,000, or more photographs into some reasonable number of thematically-coherent posts with six or so images each. When I finally exhaust (or at least stop) posts on a trip, then I have the different challenge of splicing posts together in ones and twos and threes so they form an integrated whole over ten or twelve weeks until the next big topic.
Although admittedly lower stakes since my livelihood is not dependent on it, this blog is a bit like Charles Dickens’ serialized novels where I, like him before me, am always striving to keep ahead of the Saturday evening publication deadline and am happy if I am even one installment ahead. Also like Dickens, once it is published there is no way to recall it from distribution, so I always try to have a rough plan of the coming weeks so that I can share everything I want to and don’t end up with an awkward half-post of leftover images I want to share but can’t. Even so, I sometimes have images that end up as orphans, misfits, and extras. If you are wondering what happens to these, they sometimes end up as the Image of the Week on my home page and from there, after their week in the limelight, migrate into an eclectic gallery for the curious. This was a new feature of the website in 2025, and one I am happy with. I’d like to add something else new for 2026, despite not having any more discretionary time in 2026 than I did in 2025. But I haven’t yet figured out exactly what the new feature should be. Eventually I would like to add a monthly article—something longer and more technical—but I am leery about consistently carving out enough time to do it well, so it might need to wait a couple years yet. I may content myself this year with cleaning up old posts, which go back as far as 2016. Even the posts from 2023 could use a little love to make the formatting match the rest of the site. And then, of course, I am behind on galleries, too. I’ll settle on something!
Nikon Z8 with Nikkor Z 24-120mm f/4 S at 53mm, 1/180 sec, f/9.5, ISO 500.
I have also recognized that my photography goes in fits and starts: I tend to binge-take a lot of exposures over a few days or a week, then a month or more might go by with very little hands-on-camera time. But the blog gives me a chance to work on those images and turn a subset of them into things I can share. At the end of the day, taking zillions of photos that never see the light of day is kind of pointless, and at the other extreme, forever playing with images you already have and never gathering any new ones seems, well, sad. So, I do wish I could smooth out the process a bit rather than doing first all-one and then all-the-other, but it is probably an unrealistic hope in my pre-retirement life.
Nikon Z8 with Nikkor Z 14-24mm f/2.8 S at 14mm, 1/30 sec, f/9.5, ISO 64, 6-frame focus merge.
So, where do we go from here for 2026?
First stop, Japan! I have 2,330 images from two weeks in Japan. I have a lot of organizing to do there but the first three posts have started to coagulate. Hopefully that will buy me a little time to get the next batch together. I am pretty sure I am going to end up with 12-14 posts, so I think it is safe to say that nothing else is going to get any air time until we reach April.
It was a wonderful trip, so I hope you enjoy living it vicariously as much as I will enjoy reliving it.
There are a few big trips on the docket for 2026, too, each of which will be featured in due course.
Thanks for helping me to have a wonderful year and I hope yours was everything you hoped for, too. May next year be even better for all of us!
2 responses to “Last of Leadville”
Jim: fully understand if you don’t want to post all of this. Pick out a few bits if you like?
There’s so much to discuss in your post.
As you say, digital production has led to an overwhelming number of images from each trip, and you make an important point about actually getting to see one’s own photos. Despite culling – I’ve not even looked at the new Lightroom function of that name! – I still end up with more files than I can respond to. To overcome the visibility issue, I export all my 4-star or higher-rated images to a backup folder, which I then draw on for wallpaper and multi-image screensavers. This way, I regularly see photos that would otherwise be “lost”.
Like Dickens? You may recall that throughout 2025 I have been publishing a retrospective series entitled Rob Gets to be 70! My intention was to post in at least 50 of the 52 weeks. In the event, Canada and Alaska intervened, and I also started to feel like it was becoming a chore. By 31 December, I will have managed 30 posts. I can only admire your consistency in preparing and uploading the weekly blog.
Not like Dickens? Unlike episodic narratives, most photo posts don’t create cliffhangers that demand immediate follow-up. Images interact, especially when (I know this is open to question!) they are juxtaposed in colour and black-and-white versions. They also form overall impression, but the connections are looser and less unidirectional than in most textual narrative. This is why I don’t think it would be a problem if you were to miss the occasional week. We both know Astrid McGechan, and I would guess that you subscribe to her Vision Chat. These are heavily intermittent but no less appreciated for that.
Since launching my website in April 2007, I’ve had about 1.3 million photo views — visits to recent Canada and Alaska portfolios are nearly 300 each. Yet, maintaining the site is hard. At heart, I know I want to undertake a complete redesign but I am reluctant to devote the time needed to achieve it. Moreover, I feel I do not know how much those visits mean. To my surprise, Facebook posts have been more rewarding, especially when people comment as well as Like. Again, however, I can only admire your indefatigability.
One final provocation: exceptionally, this week’s images have been allowed to speak entirely for themselves. Is this a way to create space for the occasional deep dive?
Thanks for the comments, Rob!
Your idea of exporting images to a folder that feeds screensavers is a good one…I think I might try that! I have a few things I do, but have not formalized a real strategy:
– I don’t use Lightroom “flags” (or “picks”) in my normal workflow, so I have just started using them to mark an image that I think needs to see the light of day; these appear in a Smart Collection.
– More commonly, I toss them into my “Image of the Week Candidates” collection. Each week, if I haven’t already chosen something for the Image of the Week, I will grab one of these.
The most common reason that recent groups of images get sort of missed these days is that I tend to go on a “big” trip and then have 2-3 months of posts about it; anything “small” that I do during those 2-3 months is at risk of being neglected or skipped so as not to interrupt the flow of the larger series. Sometimes I have a lull of new stuff that gives me a little time to go back, but not often enough. And then there is stuff from prior to my Santorini trip in 2022, very little of which has been covered on the blog.
Bottom line: it is worth thinking through a proper strategy for how to handle this. It could be a Quarterly Catch-Up series, or whatever.
While there are times (usually because of impending trips when I know I won’t want to be blogging) that are a little harder because I need to get ahead, it has not felt like a chore. In part because I feel that consistency is important: I don’t like blogs that are really inconsistent (like mine was prior to 2023!) where when you go there there hasn’t been anything new for 18 months. But I also don’t like blogs that post consistently enough to make you expect it on Monday but inconsistently enough to keep you off balance. As a reader/follower, it feels like they are not respecting my time. There is one blog I follow (and will not name) where they are going to a paid subscription for 2026, but why would I do that when it intermittently disappears for a few weeks and takes a month or more off twice a year, at least?
You are correct in noticing that in this week’s blog the images and the text were completely unrelated. I had the images ready but wanted to write about something else, so that’s what happened. I suspect it is better to do that than to sprinkle in a random comment or two about the images. I think one reason that happened is that the set of images did not really coalesce into a theme; I think in the end I had two posts of material but only one week to do it because I wanted to start 2026 off with Japan, so the set ended up as a mashup that used half of the images I had found. So, it wasn’t really a deliberate decision, but I might have to do it on purpose every now and again.
The blog is a bit of work, but comments from readers make it worthwhile, so thank you; you end up putting work into it as well.