Why Your Favorite Photos Matter More Than Your Best Ones

Dec 28, 2025

Why your favorite photos, not your best ones, might be the clearest map to your evolving photographic style. An end-of-year exercise that helped me understand my style and gave me a clear direction for what to chase next.

January through June: early favorites from the year (Click an image to enlarge and view the full photograph.)

Each year, I look back across all the images I made and select a single favorite photo from each month. It’s an exercise that helps me grow as a photographer—not by judging what I did “best,” but by paying attention to what I actually enjoyed making. More than anything, it helps me redirect my energy in the coming year toward the kinds of photographs that resonate with me personally.

I’ve written about this process before (and I also give a presentation on it to clubs). I’ve found that selecting your favorite photos at the end of the year can help you identify your style, and, more importantly, continue to develop it.

What is style?

I like to keep things simple. To me, photographic style is photographing the subjects you like to photograph in the way you like to photograph them. It doesn’t have to be unique or original if it satisfies a few basic criteria.

A strong style is one that:

Satisfies your own expressive vision
Evokes an emotional response in you
Changes as you change, growing alongside your interests
Evokes emotional responses from others

Style isn’t something that remains static. It’s something that evolves as you pay attention to what matters to you.

How selecting favorites helps develop your style

Selecting your favorite photos helps reveal what kinds of images truly resonate with you. These favorites may not be your “best” photos. They may even fall outside what you think of as your current style. That distinction is important because it will help you identify which direction you want your style to go.

The process is at the end of each year take time to look back over all the photos you took and select your favorites (one from each month, or simply twelve from the year).

Once you’ve assembled your favorites look at them together. Are there patterns? Similar light, subjects, moods, or reasons they became favorites? Those answers can point directly toward what you might want to explore next.

After you identify those patterns, you can decide what to lean into during the coming year. Leaning into those patterns helps create or grow your style. If you don't think you have a style currently, then chasing your favorites and the patterns that you found can help you develop a style.

Analyzing my favorite photos

When I look across my images from this year, a few don’t resonate as strongly as the others. Those are April and June. In both months, I didn’t shoot much. While I love April’s image from the Smoky Mountains, it’s a photograph I’ve made before under similar conditions. The June image is one I like, but macro photography hasn’t been clicking with me lately. I set both of those aside as I continued my analysis.

Another image that stands apart is the night sky photo from May. I made it using a two-image blending technique I’ve been refining over the past couple of years. The goal of that technique is simplicity: creating sharp foregrounds and compelling skies in a way that’s easy to teach and easy for workshop participants to succeed with. I feel good about where that process is now, and I’ll continue teaching it in 2026. Stylistically, though, it closely resembles one of my favorite images from 2021, which suggests continuity rather than change.

The remaining images share some clear characteristics. Nearly all feature dynamic skies and strong side light. Two are photographed directly into the sun, which has long been my typical sunrise and sunset approach. The others are made with the sun just out of frame or well away from the horizon.

That’s interesting to me, because over the past year I’ve noticed myself enjoying photographs where the sun isn’t in the frame. Looking back, my favorite images from 2024 included eight sunrise or sunset photographs, nearly all shot directly into the sun. The one exception was made in December 2024. I can trace this shift in interest back at least that far.

What does that mean?

It means that in 2026, I want to spend more time looking for photographs with dynamic skies and strong side light, while keeping the sun out of the frame unless the light and clouds demand otherwise. That feels like a clear and natural direction to explore.

Maybe it will stick. Maybe it won’t. That uncertainty is part of the point.

Early in 2025, I struggled with photography because I felt like I wasn’t growing or changing. It wasn’t that I ran out of ideas. I had plenty, and I tried a few projects to push myself, but they felt forced and didn’t connect. I felt like I was chasing growth instead of just letting it happen.

That’s a frustrating place to be, especially after years of feeling engaged and curious. It made photography feel more like work than exploration and discovery.

What changed wasn’t that I needed a new technique or a bold new project. What changed was that I wasn’t paying attention to the photographs I kept returning to; the images that stayed with me as favorites throughout the year. Those favorites offer a new direction to follow, one that feels organic.

Now I have a direction that comes directly from the photographs I enjoyed making most in 2025. That feels like a more honest path to follow and a more interesting direction to chase.

I hope you’ll try this exercise yourself. Assemble your favorite photos and ask: What do these images say about what I enjoy photographing? If you do, I’d love to hear what you discover.