My top images of 2020

24 Dec 2020 — 8 min read

Connections, light, and learning: a look at the best of my wildlife and landscape photography this year.

In the past I’ve sometimes selected five top images from the year. It’s a useful exercise, but this year I’ve failed to narrow it down anywhere near as tightly.

I believe that, despite my lack of travel compared to recent years — or perhaps because of my lack of travel — 2020 has been the most important year so far in my development as a photographer. Of course, I still have much to learn and a long way to go. In some respects I am a harsher critic of my own photographic skills now than I’ve ever been, but I am also pleased with what I’ve been able to create in a year with precious little travel.

Although I’m not always a very good critic of my own work, looking back over the last three years I can see clear evidence of progression. My top five images from 2018 were all landscapes, mostly shot on the trail — and only two of them remain in my ‘best ever’ collection in Lightroom. In 2019 I was able to narrow my top selection down to eight (although I never got around to blogging about them). I remain happy with last year’s selection, but this year I believe I’ve been able to hit a higher note.

For me, 2020 has been the Year of the Telephoto. I’ve seldom used a wide-angle lens at all, and only two of my top images use a wider perspective. I think this has helped me to concentrate on subject, and it has certainly helped me to achieve simpler, stronger compositions.

In 2020 it’s all been about craft and diligence: fieldcraft in patiently studying the animals and birds I photographed extensively in the early part of the year, planning and previsualisation for a few key landscape shots, a more exacting approach to composition, and greater ruthlessness in culling sub-par images.

I’ve listed seventeen photographs below. I hope you enjoy them!

These images are low-resolution versions compressed for the web. You can click on any of the thumbnails to see a larger image. All images © Alex Roddie and All Rights Reserved. Please don’t reproduce these images without permission.

Wildlife

Subjects that have fascinated me this year include common whitethroats, barn owls, deer (roe and muntjac), and foxes. Only a couple of these photographs were not ‘worked for’ in some way; in most cases I spent days or even weeks studying the animal and its habits before succeeding in creating the image.

14 March 2020. I studied these snipe for about an hour, and found them challenging to photograph, as they blended in so perfectly with the reed cover at their feet. Sadly, the first national lockdown meant that I was unable to return to the hide for a long time after this day, so I didn’t see the birds again.

28 May 2020. I’d seen this magnificent roebuck several times over the previous weeks, and had observed that he tended to make a predictable tour of the various hedgerows and meadows in the area each morning, starting at one end and finishing at the other. On this morning I succeeded in capturing this image of him at rest from close quarters.

28 May 2020. After several off-the-cuff attempts to photograph this beautiful barn owl when I came upon it by surprise, I began to study its habits. Although it didn’t always hunt in these meadows, when it did it tended to use a highly predictable pattern of flight from one meadow to the next, up and down. This helped me to get in position for this image well in advance. Although I captured several other images of this individual later in the year, this remains my favourite.

31 May 2020. An opportunistic shot of an azure damselfy while walking through a small patch of woodland — nothing revolutionary, but I find the colours and composition most pleasing.

17 June 2020. This muntjac is another creature of habit that I saw several times a week for most of May and June. Like the roebuck, he had a predictable round through the area. On this morning of dense fog I secreted myself in a ditch and managed to capture this image from only a few metres away.

30 June 2020. I’d only seen this doe a couple of times, and her movements seemed less predictable than those of the buck. On this particular morning I saw her rolling about in the long grass of one of the meadows. A bit of belly-crawling for a few tense minutes brought me incredibly close, and I ended up wedged painfully in a thorn hedge. I’ll never forget the moment of connection as our eyes met — genuinely like nothing I’d ever experienced before. The resulting image is the most personally meaningful from the whole year.

1 July 2020. The common whitethroats became a bit of a long-running project for me over the spring and summer. I was there when they first started to appear and select their spots in the hedgerow, I was there to hear their first tuneful songs, and I was there during the nest-building stage and for the chicks hatching. It took me a while to figure out how to best approach them, and I captured many images of these marvellous little birds, but this is my favourite. You might be able to see the spider clutched in its beak.

6 August 2020. I think of this handsome chap as the Gunby Fox. He patrols the patchwork of woods and fields around the Gunby estate, and I’ve seen him quite a number of times, but never this close. On this particular morning I happened to spot him at the far side of the moat earthworks, his attention captured by a bunch of magpies sitting on a fence, and I crawled very close through the long grass. I was able to squeeze off a short sequence of images. This is the precise moment when he realised I was watching him; within seconds he had bounded away, an orange blur in the grass.

Landscape

Most of my landscape images this year have been telephoto shots of local details, such as autumn leaves in the hedgerow. The Poet, of course, my favourite local subject, makes an appearance in this list. There are also three images from my March trip to the Cairngorms. These were more spontaneous and relied on the luck of the light.