This has been an interesting year for Arielle and me. It was my busiest year to date. This year I had 73 days of shooting. About a third of them were for personal projects. My projects consisted of Vancouver Winter Olympics, 26 Blocks and a story on the rodeo queens of the Prescott Rodeo that will be published in the NSCU Alumni magazine in the spring.

Through out it all, I’ve had an amazing amount of support from Arielle. At times she’s my muse, most of the time she helps keeps me sane through the craziness.

Through a weird scheduling quirk, the Fiesta Bowl Parade happened twice this year, on January 2nd and December 31st. I thought it was an interesting way to book end the year.

This year I traveled more for business than any other year.

Vancouver was an amazing experience. I felt like I really pushed my vision to produce some of my best work.

It was a tough edit to get it down to only 4 images of the close to 10k images I made over 2 1/2 weeks.

Brad is an amazing guy and a great friend. He really helped me get a handle on my Vancouver work. I’m not someone that is very good at editing my own work, so I’m fortunate to have a friend like Brad.

I haven’t posted any photos from my summer Rodeo Project. The magazine that is publishing it was scheduled to publish the story in December, but it got bumped to the spring. I wanted to hold off showing work from it until it was published. Since it’s been bumped until spring, I thought I would show a couple photos that made it into my best of.

I’m very grateful I had the opportunity to participate in 26 Blocks. It’s a great project with a bunch of very talented writers and photographers.

This year was probably the year I’ve shot the least amount of sports since I got into photojournalism.

Both of these photos were shot on my iPhone. One of my goals for the coming year is to shoot more for myself. This is a great tool to help, since according to a famous photographer, “the best camera is the one you have on you.”

Election night was an interesting night. I hadn’t covered one since I was in Clovis.

One thing that I’ve learned: No matter where your journeys take you, bring a camera and always make images that you’re happy with.

Since I left the newspaper, I’ve shot more assignments and projects then I ever have. I’ve also spent more hours in my office in front of my computer than I ever have. I’m happy to say when an amazing sunset happens, I still make an image of it. I haven’t found two amazing sunsets that are the same.

I have a lot to look forward to in the coming year. No matter how busy I get I’ll always remind myself to have fun and shoot for myself. If I can do that every time I pick up my camera I will be successful beyond my wildest dreams.

I started it off with the idea I need a major overhaul of my portfolio. Currently, it’s more newspaper focused. To start, I went through all my photos from the past two years. I do mean all of them. From this I pulled about 500 photos that thought represented me as a photographer. I was able to narrow this down to about 200. I printed those out, laid them all on the floor and Arielle and I proceeded to cut it down to about 50. Of which we pulled out several themes. This is the beginning of my new editorial portfolio.

As painstaking as it was, I’m going to try to make it a habit at year’s end to review my photos from the previous year. It’s amazing how things pop up. Here are a couple photos I found that have made their way into my portfolio.