This hasn’t been easy and I thank David, Scott and Hamish for setting me the (actually enjoyable) task.
It turned out my favourite fell just outside the last 12 months (I’m taking ‘2025’ to mean the previous 12 months up to the date of writing) – and that image was actually also one of the worst of the year. It was the featured image in my TLR User Errors article, and like Hamish’s choice it was associated with events of the time and in particular my inability to turn auto-pilot off – I was developing two rolls of 120 as if it was two rolls of 35mm so using an insufficient quantity of developer.
But that set the tone for how to choose my favourite.
At first I was thinking purely about the images I had taken over the year and I disappointingly found there were not many good ones. Initially I thought of the image Ibraar Hussein had kindly chosen to feature in his Analogue Newsletter September 2025. Of course 2025 for me had been a TLR year and for one reason of another when I went out with the TLR the weather and/or the lighting and/or the subject matter fell into my target market so the bulk of my passable (I won’t say good) shots were taken on a TLR. My favourites were perhaps the two fog shots in my article about a trip to Hamburg.
Then I remembered my first choice – terrible image but it was the emotion that it triggered in me that mattered.
That pointed to my choice (the featured image) from my “Life ad Death in London” article. I have lived in Hackney, London (UK) for 30 years, albeit over the last 20 on an occasional basis, and was a regular walker/stalker around the railway lines in the East End, particularly Brick Lane and environs. Many times I had walked around those back streets, alleyways, dirty corners and derelict sites carrying my M3 with the Zeiss Sonnar lens taking photos of whatever grabbed my attention. The walk on this particular day was nothing out of the ordinary – apart from bumping into and talking to another photographer on the way – and indeed the image itself is not particularly out of the ordinary. But what tugged my heartstrings was the message written on the steps as I walked down: “I miss her”, “you should call her”.
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