2012 Top Ten People & Animals

It’s the season for top ten lists. I know I’ve read at least five top ten 2012 movie lists in addition to all the other lists that have been featured on-line and in newspapers in the last month. Last year  was a signature photographic travel year for me with journeys to the Galapagos islands, Patagonia, Acadia and the Southwest all on my 2012 itinerary. I’m usually a looking forward guy and don’t spend a lot of time reflecting on the past. But as the year ended I thought I should spend a moment reflecting on the images I made in the past twelve months and that maybe I could learn some lessons that I could apply in the future.

As I reviewed the best of the 9,000 images I made in 2013, it made sense to divide them up into two categories; people & animals and landscapes. So I bring you my ten favorite people & animal images from 2012 with the top ten landscape images to come in the next posting.

Because they were used as sustenance by pirates and then by Nantucket whalers, tortoise populations were driven to very low numbers and some species became extinct by the early 20th century. fortunately, conservation efforts in the last fifty years have resulted in a rise in the tortoise census. Most tortoises seen by tourists are on Eco-farms or in the Darwin Research Station. There are large numbers of tortoises in the wild but in areas in which tourists are not allowed. This fellow is having a snack and the concentration of the image on the head and scaly arms provide a great portrait.

This was taken in a popular city square in Quito, Ecuador. There were hundreds of pigeons being fed by several youngsters who were having great fun running through the sitting birds in order to get them to fly and scatter. We were with a guide at this time and unbeknownst to me as I was taking these shots, a thief was eyeing my camera and was chased off by our guide. I like this image because it captures the delight of the boy and also shows the birds fleeing him.

I shot this on Gardner Bay, a drop dead beautiful beach in the Galapagos. On this day we counted 339 Sea Lions lounging on the pristine white sand. They hadn’t a care in the world and were completely nonplussed by us fifteen humans walking among them.

This young lady was being pushed around town in her stroller by her teenage brother when I saw her and asked to take a photograph. I took several and then suddenly she gave me the raspberry and I snapped this image. Could her eyes be any deeper?

Nothing prepares you for the startling appearance of these birds. The feet which attract the opposite sex during mating season, are redder than you thought possible. And the light blue and pink beak colors complement the red feet. Boobys are expert fishermen and spend most of their lives over the ocean alighting on land only to raise their chicks.

As a photographer, sometimes you just have to be ready and lucky. My wife and I were on a side street in a small Ecuadorian town when across the street this young fellow was eating and walking along side a large orange billboard. I raised my camera and took two quick shots and managed to place him walking into the image while eating a mouthfull….and looking directly at me. Perfect!

While strolling down the main street in Provincetown, MA on a Saturday night, we heard disco music coming from up ahead. When we turned the next corner we ran smack into a boisterous “Pink Party” spread over the street and the veranda of a local house.  The music was pulsating on the veranda and everybody was prancing up a storm in full pink regalia. We would have gone into the house but felt a little under dressed. It was crazy fun!

Here are a pair of Noddy Terns on a shelf in the Galapagos. These photographs are always serendipitous in that when the photographer snaps the shutter he is looking to get an interesting interaction between the two birds and doesn’t really know that he’s captured these striking eyes until he sees the image on a computer monitor.

The native dress of Ecuadorian women make them great photographic subjects. I shot this woman in the main square in Quito, Ecuador while she was enjoying a cup of ice cream.

Darwin called these marine iguanas the ugliest creatures on earth. Maybe so, but they are a photographers dream. The challenge for photographers when shooting subjects that have been shot thousands of times previously is to get images that are different and show the animals in a different way. I like the way these guys are lined up surveying the scene and using the proper camera settings blurs the background which allows them to stand out clearly.

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Shrewsbury, MA