2025 A Year of Challenges

As of writing this, Christmas is in two days and new years is seven days after that. Just a few days ago I wrapped up my first workshop with Nature Photography Collective. Three days before that I made it for the second time to a once in a lifetime location. A few months before that, I stood on the top of a ridge and shed a few tears because I survived a situation that I went into on shaky mental grounds. In February I topped off the most financially successful month of my career. On January 1st promised myself this was going to be the best year yet.

I don’t know how to describe this year other than an emotional rollercoaster and definitely not the best year. I could live with less emotional rollercoasters and more stable states for a bit, to be honest.

New Images Taken In 2025

2025 caps off the year with the most images I have ever taken in a single year. I added 13,756 images to my lightroom catalogue. That’s 5000 images more than 2024. That is a lot of photos. Of those 13,000 images 2000 of them come from 10 or so images. At the beginning of this year, I was trying something different, focus stacking macro subjects. This type of photography takes a huge amount of images to pull off. Often 40 or so images to pull together a single image. Each time I do a composition it might consumer 200-300 images. Three compositions later and I am 1000 images into an SD card. I threw away hundreds of images from this focus stack experiment, thus they don’t even show up in the numbers.

This year had a few particularly novel trips for me. The first one of the year was my trip to Canyonlands. That was a 4-day trip with views unlike anything else in Utah. Next is Alaska, which was 8 days of photography. Those two trips account for a third of my images for 2025. Other significant days include one photoshoot of an event, my death valley workshop in December, and a fall photography photoshoot for three days in Escalante. Those three other events account for another 3000 images or so. So between Focus stack (9 images), Canyonlands (4 days), Alaska (8 days), Escalante (3 days), Folk Festival (1 afternoon), (Death Valley 5 days), I took nearly 10,000 images. A relatively huge amount of photos from relatively few days.

Now how successful was I when it came to photos that I deemed worthy… I am not sure. I am behind editing, but when going through my “finals images” folder on my computer I have added about 100 images. So about a .72% success rate of a keeper image. Of these images that I have deemed worthy of portfolio addition, only 9 have ever been printed, though all of them I think have sold, so that’s cool.

Once again, it is hard to deem the success to shoot ratio just by numbers alone. Often I am sitting at one composition that takes 40 images as I let the light and color rotate through and I get the final image out of that. Sometimes these extra images become assignment images for my students, making them a success in my eyes.

I guess in the end, the images I took this year won’t play any significant role when it comes to financial returns for quite a while. Some images may never be paid off, while others will shoulder the burnt of the financial load. My Alaska images are technically very expensive but have now been used in a variety of products like calendars and small prints. I plan to use them for a lot of writing in the future and they should end up working quite nice for me. But only time will tell.

Sales

2025 was unremarkable in total sales. I sold a total of 586 unites (includes calendars and images) as of this writing. This is up from 2024 but far lower than 2023 or 2022 when it comes to overall things sold. With huge chunks of those prints sold coming out of a few shows in particular (I am looking at you Swiss Days). What was different was the amount I made per sale. I made the most profit I have ever made in my entire life this year selling my images.

I think I broke $50,000 after expenses this year. I don’t know for sure because I would have to pull up accounting software and I am just not going to do that. In addition this is also only looking at printing expenses and square expenses, which doesn’t take into account gas and other business expenses.

For you steady income people who get paid by someone else, I hope you realize the monumental effort it takes to find every dollar of this. This is hundreds of phone calls, thousands of miles driven, and tens of thousands of people spoken to this year. I suspect my images have been seen by over 100,000 people this year at shows.

Important Images

Looking at images sold, this year actually has a few things of particular note worth pointing out. First, one photo outsold all the others by nearly double the next best seller. Even though it sold more, it was not the most profitable photo of the year, that goes to a photo that sold three times, all of which were 30x60 or bigger.

The winning print of the year that sold more than any other print was my images titled “Astro Watchman,” having sold 41 prints this year. Most of these are my open edition small prints. The most profitable image was my image Alstrom Point, which sold well as a 30x60 tryptic. I do believe this is the first time this image has held this position as the usual champion is actually Mesa Arch.

When you actually look at the top 10 prints by number sold, something kind of interesting becomes apparent. No images I have taken in the past two years are in my top 10 images of 2025 for number of images sold. The logical explanation for 2025 is that they were being created. As for 2024 though, it does feel odd none of these images have percolated to the top, though one is close, Upper Kanarraville in Gold. It misses the top ten actually due to alphabetical order as it is tied for 11 prints sold with the bottom of the top 10 images of 2025.

I think this trend has actually been true for a few years now, particularly since I am beginning to have a fairly large backlog of images. What I think is odd is that 2018 has an outsize effect on the top ten images sold.

My best hypothesis is that in 2018 I hit a sweet spot in physical abilities, time, skill and equipment. I was about peak physical fitness as I had wrapped up my final season as a seasonal wildlife technician so I could hike forever and go out in any conditions and just suffer through it easily. I only had two kids who were small and not in school so could be taken wherever at any time. I was also getting my stride in editing, field technique, and gear combination that resulted in higher quality images. The next few years after this point where major drops in images taken as I was a full time graduate student and spent nearly every waking moment doing school or watching kids as my wife was working to support us through my education.

The Future

2026 is the first year of photography workshops with Nature Photography Collective. That will become a big focus as the year progresses. This first year has five workshops. In 2027 I am hoping to do 10 a year and continue that for the foreseeable future. So that is the long term outlook over the next few years.

For art shows, I think those are going to be a continual thing for the foreseeable future as well. If I could, I think the smart thing for me to do is to create a series of images that match a series of regions and rotate my booth to match. So I need the following booths: southern Utah, a northern Utah/Mountains, and a California booth setup. My southern Utah booth is pretty well established. My northern Utah booth kind of sucks, so I need to get on that. I have a decent collection of California images these days, but I really need to hit the following parks hard: Yosemite, Joshua Tree, Kings Canyon and possibly the Redwoods again. Somewhere in that mix I should have a few beach shots and then I need to do a trip through the pacific northwest and add some major green scenes to by line up of images in my booth. Canada is calling my name along with Alaska. I want a rematch with the arctic north to get more awesome photos. Just have to make enough to get there.

Time and money I guess.

Next, I need to create something that has a steady state of income. I just don’t know what that would be or if that is ever really a thing unless I do something like a Patrion. Do I have any ideas for a Patrion…. No. Do I want to do a podcast… no. I did at one point, but it doesn’t sound appealing to me at the moment. I might begin writing… a lot. There is a niche that I think I can fill when it comes to National Parks, Biology and mixing in my photography. I don’t think it will ever replace my every day income, but it might turn into a steady trickle in the future. I think I need to make a first draft and ship it around and see what people think. Stay tuned.