They were yearning to become a photograph of the year

Ok, drawing from corporate bullshit bingo, this was one of the few calls to action that I was keen on following: Hamish asking 35mmc contributors to submit their single photograph of the year of 2025 – and for readers to become contributors. I was hooked as I immediately had my photograph of the year in mind. And intimidated as I would need to become a contributor and write up a piece to go along with the photograph. So, here we go…

To make sure she was the one and only, I sat down to browse my image collection from 2025, a few hundred images, mostly film. Several dozens of them proved special to me, but the initial flash of inspiration stood out. Done deal.

There were times when I thought that creating special photographs would require travel. The more exotic, the merrier. It took a couple of years to realise that there is no place like home. Like so many had found out before me. Repetitively revisiting the same places in our close surroundings distills the very essence of where we enjoy life, for the most part anyway. Those areas out and about in hiking or cycling distance, and the micro places within them. Or the most obscure and dodgy spots in the village or the town nearby. It’s not your usual postcard scenery that entices me, but the subjects others would consider ugly, that would be avoided, or, best case, that they would ignore due to their putative arbitrariness.

These Douglas pines were no strangers to me. I had visited them many times before – on sunshiny afternoons, snowy winter days, dusk, dawn, moonlit nights. Foggy days were always the best. Fog is a blessing granted by Mother Earth any day. I dropped by my friends over and over again. They never complained about my company, even if they repeatedly had their picture taken on what seemed like a fulsome variety of cameras and films. Those photographs would always fail to express the depth and density of this little spinney.

But one day, in February of 2025, on a mildly misty morning, I cracked it, I think. The pines were very happy with their family photograph.

My photograph of 2025 was made with a Plaubel Makina 670 on Kodak Gold at f/22 for 1.5 seconds – guess why. C41 development as per usual, camera scanned at home, then home printed on Hahnemuehle Photo Rag Satin for those pastel colours.

More of my photography can be found at einefragederzeit.de or on Flickr

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