Yearly Recap 2025 All In

Every year around this time I put together a single post to add to my set of Yearly Recap Albums. I started doing this as a way to take a more objective view of my photography, and to remind myself that photography isn't based on what you shot yesterday, but what you have done concisely over longer periods of time.

For this experiment each year I try to select about 24 images, 2 per month, to represent the year. This doesn't always work. Some months I shoot very little, some a lot, so I use that as a baseline for what I'm looking for. This year, in 2025, I ended up choosing more than 24 images. They also aren't exactly in chronological order, but it's close. They are more in an order of presentation, and they are also huge images. This one post I try to do in really large high resolution images but it gets included in my Photo Albums as portfolios. So this post may take longer to load in case you were wondering.

New Blogs in 2025

This year instead of just posted the 24 images I decided to make this a recap of the entire year from blogging to photography to life, starting with the blogging stuff.

This year we (Deborah and I) consolidated designs and added two new full blogging sites, Shanty Travelers, which concentrates on our van travels and beach adventures, and one for our labor of love, Deborah's Iris Garden (DIG). We spent months creating solid content for each of those sites, backdating posts to cover the time span of 2003-Current for our traveling site, and 2020-Current for our garden. These site have virtually no traffic and no subscribers still. I'm pretty sure Google is still trying to decided if they are real or spammy-link-bait sites. Hopefully 2026 will be great years for those two sites because they are not link-bait AI filled posts, they are real blogs written by real people.

Some Blogging Stats

Each year I try to sum up some thoughts about the year, pertaining to photography and life, but this is a blog and bloggers love looking at stats, so it's a little about that too. In a bit of the "oversharing" I'll say stat-wise this year was better than it has been in a long time.

In fact, somehow, 2025 ended up being better than every year going all the way back to 2017 when looking at the entire year's traffic. But for some weird reason (who really ever knows with this stuff anyway), this December was better than every single month going all the way back to April 2013 (and I didn't even post as much).

My best post of the year ended up being How to Use Focus Stacking for Macro Photography, which again, is really cool because I spent a lot of time on that post. It also ended up being a post I have to go back to each time to figure out how to do the stacking myself, so it was helpful to me just to do the post.

You can also see from the graphic above my blog virtually died in 2018-2019 and I've been clawing my way back ever since. Hopefully the December trend will continue into 2026.

This Year's Blog Discoveries

Blogging tends to get a lot of bad press about how it's a dead platform. I think this is because it isn't YouTube, it's words, and photos (I'm not knocking YouTube, we watch a TON of YouTube and we did find some really cool YouTubers this year too, like The Kombi Chronicles).

I still firmly believe this format has a lot of value to add to the content world. I talked about this in Blogging is Not Dead and the Sunrise and I mentioned several blogs in Summer Flowers and Finding Fascinating People. These new blog discoveries remind me of what a great community blogging still is in 2025. It has never been about finding the largest quantity of sites and huge amounts of traffic, but quality sites, that post consistently, that you can get to know over time. It's about people. It's not about over advertising, or bots, or clickbait, or a certain number of subscribers, it is about relationships with new people formed around a way of communicating through words and photos of real people doing real things. The onset of AI everything in 2025 is a whole different animal.

My highest referral site among the blogging community this year was One Camera One Lens, which is cool because I only discovered Mark's site this year and have really enjoyed his posts too.

One of my most unique finds of the year was over at Shojiwax.com mainly because of the raw unfiltered nature of his photos and posts. I envy the boldness of his posts, and love when bloggers post things like Feedback poll: do you read my posts? which was a genuine question he had (don't we all).

And finally one of my most challenging but rewarding finds in 2025 was Baty.net. I say challenging because he literally changes blogging platforms once or twice a week so trying to keep up with where to find his site is like a treasure hunt. You have to be a bit of an internet sleuth to keep up. I really enjoy Jack Baty's nearly daily posts and photography, but I have learned more about platforms and static site generators than I ever expected when I found his site.

Some of the sites I discovered this year have stuck with me. This is a very short list, but is worth checking out...

• One Camera One Lens Photography
• Randy Schoener Photography
• Slow Shutter Speed
• Photographias
• The Rusty Ruin Journal
• No Facilities
• Shojiwax.com
• Jack Baty

Thoughts About 2025

And finally I get to the photos for this year. This year, 2025, started off with a super rare massive blizzard-type of thing (see Historic Gulf Coast Winter Storm 2025). And we don't do snow down here! But the rest of the year focused on building out our Iris Garden beds (see Progress Update on Raised Iris Bed Construction), spring-summer flowers, bike paths (including Meeting a Bikepacker Riding on I-10) and building the interior our camper van Loki to finally get on some actual real van adventures.

But, to me, the highlight of 2025 was just being all-in with the things we did do together. If there is anything I have learned about marriage in 30 years it is this... you have to have something, or many somethings, that you do together that you both are all-in about. Something you can both focus on, both contribute to equality, and both look forward to the next time you get to do whatever that is.

Finding something you and your spouse really truly enjoy doing together, especially as you get older, isn't always the easiest thing to do. But you should never stop trying. I picked out this phrase all-in in January 2025 to refer to my photography (which is not much of a shared activity), but as the year progressed I focused less on my photography, and life is always better when you put things in their proper place. For us, this year, the all-in we found together was finishing the Iris Garden construction, and the Van build, and you can see that in the images below.

2025 Recap Images

If you take any amount of photos throughout the year I would highly recommend taking an overview of your year in photos. It’s revealing and reminds me that we did accomplish a lot of things in life.

I hope you enjoyed these images, if you have a post that recaps your year, please leave a link below so we can all check it out. To check out some of the previous years collections you can click on the Yearly Recap tag.

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