Time for my annual photo retrospective. For those of you who haven't seen one of these before, I always have two rules in building this collection:
1) One photo per month.
2) None of which has been shown on DU before.
Normally, at this point, I gripe about how difficult it's been to choose this year, because I tend to post every good image I shoot here. This year, it was even harder...but not for the usual reason. Rather, since most of my photo posts this year we on DU2, I honestly have no idea which images I posted here already and which I didn't. So, when making picks, I had to work on the principle of "if there's even a slight chance this photo got posted, leave it out." Nonetheless, there's a slight chance that I may have inadvertently included an already-displayed image in this thread; if so, my apologies for not living up to my usual standards.
January starts off with the actual first photo I took all year, at the city plaza in Renton, Washington, a few hours before work crews arrived to take down the lights.
In
February, a trip to the San Diego Wild Animal Park (I still refuse to call it the "Safari Park" ) brought an image of these two, just lion' around.
March, in this
La Niņa year, provided less early blooming than usual; nonetheless, I was able to capture
Chained Beauty.
La Niņa or no,
April is always "tulip month" in the Northwest, and this year didn't disappoint, even though they arrived a couple of weeks later than usual.
May brought my first serious Water Falling Over Things trip, this time up to Bellingham for Whatcom Falls.
June continued the water theme, with Rocky Brook Creek on the Olympic Peninsula.
July was for the birds, as a trip to a Sequim lavender farm brought a bonus of a few (caged) peacocks on the property. (You know you're old when the first thing that comes to mind upon seeing a peacock in full display is "this program is being brought to you in living color on NBC." )
August brought the "sunset for the ages," subject of another thread. The evening before, we had a somewhat-less-impressive sunset, but a returning fishing boat showed up at just the right time.
Because of the aforementioned
La Niņa, the usual August wildflower shows on Mount Rainier got delayed until
September. Thus is was that I got up at an ungodly hour on, yes, 9/11, with plans to be at Reflection Lakes for sunrise. These plans lasted until I got to the southeast park entrance and discovered, unbelievably, that the National Park Service had
already closed Stevens Canyon Road for the year, making access to my planned location impossible. Needing a "Plan B," I wound up at Tipsoo Lake on Chinook Pass in the pre-dawn hours, in time to catch this view of Orion.
Late
October brought the (once again, delayed) first signs of fall color, with this view of Middle Tumwater Falls.
But the foliage didn't turn in the Seattle area until
November, as seen in this shot from Kuboda Garden.
Finally, we end the year as we began it, with
December bringing the spectacular Garden D'Lights display at Bellevue Botanical Gardens.