This week, we welcome Steve Hyde as our guest host—welcome, Steve! His theme, Best Ever Photos, ties perfectly into World Photography Week, with World Photography Day falling on August 19. As luck would have it, Thursday is the day I publish my responses to the weekly challenge. Steve writes, “I thought this would be a fantastic opportunity for everyone to share with the Lens-Artists contributors their ‘BEST EVER IMAGES’! Pictures that celebrate our love of photography.” You can read his full challenge post here.

I’ve been reading other photographers’ responses and can relate to the nearly universal sentiment: choosing only five favorites was no small task. My own process began with scrolling through my archives, looking for images with a personal connection—photographs that mark milestones in my development as a photographer. Each one carries a story from the journey I’ve been on since rekindling my long‑standing affinity for making images.

My opening photo has the deepest personal connection. It also marks the first time I used exposure bracketing to create a high‑dynamic‑range image. A short drive to Rollag, Minnesota, for the Western Minnesota Steam Threshers Reunion gave me access to plenty of industrial and steam‑powered equipment, making this scene my first real HDR learning experience.

When I posted the image on social media in 2015, another photographer—who has since become a close friend—commented on this photo. We got more acquainted over the years, and even though we live in different states, we’ve kept in close contact.

I decided to reprocess the shot for this post, to make a small adjustment to the sky to tame its crunchiness. What truly convinced me to stick with bracketing was discovering that the “properly exposed” frame rendered the engine’s undercarriage as a dark, featureless mass behind the wheels. At the same time, the overexposed bracket revealed all the structure and character hiding in the shadows. Lightroom merged the set beautifully, and I’ve been bracketing when necessary ever since.

In 2006, we traveled to Mazatlán, Mexico, for our son and daughter‑in‑law’s wedding. After the ceremony, held on an outdoor terrace at our hotel, the family lingered to enjoy the warm evening air. As the sun began to set, I noticed a pair of beach vendors comparing notes from their day’s activities. I captured the moment with a Fuji FinePix 3800 at full zoom. When I later processed the image for a blog post about Mazatlán, the resolution was adequate, but for Flickr I prefer images in 2K HD—2048 on the long edge. To bring this one up to that standard, I used Photoshop’s Generative Upscale with the Topaz Gigapixel option. It remains one of my favorite photos because of the warm golden‑hour glow and the sense of two old friends sharing the stories of their day.

On our first trip to London in 2022, I ventured out at night near our hotel with my Sony DSC‑RX100M5 point‑and‑shoot camera. I chose the small camera mainly because of its f/1.8–2.8 lens, the fastest lens in my kit. The resulting image looked fine in color, but I thought a black‑and‑white treatment would be more interesting. Using Silver Efex 2, one of its presets took the photo almost to the finish line, and I toned down the highlights and added a slight vignette to darken the corners. That vignette, along with the leading lines of the street curbing, draws the eye into the frame. I chose this image for its moody atmosphere and its glimpse into London’s nightlife.

One of my “bucket‑list” journeys checked off in 2024 when Lynn and I, accompanied by my niece and her husband, trekked to Kruger National Park in South Africa for a photo safari. We spent six days in the park with a blogging friend who also served as our tour guide. I took countless wildlife photos I would have loved to include in this challenge, but I narrowed it down to one.

Throughout the trip, we searched for clear views of a leopard, but most of what I captured on camera were distant faces or vague shapes in the brush—just enough to know a leopard was there. It wasn’t until our last full day in the park that we finally got close enough (with a zoom lens) to photograph two leopard cubs sitting beneath a tree. I chose this image because I was happy to capture one cub looking directly toward me as I took the photo with a Nikon D500 and a Nikkor 200–500mm f/5.6 lens, wide open at 480mm. Even at that long zoom, I cropped the image further to isolate the cub from its surroundings.

I like to consider myself a landscape photographer, yet my five favorites for this challenge include only one true landscape image. With so many options, selecting a single photo to represent all my landscape work was daunting. In 2014, we cruised to Alaska, and our ship sailed into Glacier Bay National Park. At each glacier, the captain stopped and rotated the ship 360 degrees using the bow and stern thrusters, giving everyone a full view. When it came down to picking just one photo, I kept returning to this shot from our stop at Lamplugh Glacier. After seeing the main wall of tidewater ice, I looked off to the side at the higher basin.

What caught my eye was the smaller ice stream tumbling down through a narrow gap in the mountains, spilling out over a huge gravel delta before reaching the green water. The moody overcast sky brought out the rich greens on the rocky slopes and emphasized the landscape’s raw, rugged textures. Those mineral‑rich slopes on the hillside left me in awe of Glacier Bay’s incredible scale.

Thanks to Steve, I enjoyed sharing some of my favorite photos again—several reprocessed using my current workflow. You can view the images in 2K HD and check out the metadata on my Flickr gallery here. Last week, I enjoyed seeing everyone’s response to Egidio’s “Over the Top” challenge and reminiscing about my trip to Barcelona. Next week, Ritva hosts. Be sure to follow her here so you don’t miss her challenge, which will go live on Saturday, August 22, at noon Eastern Time.

If you’re sharing a Lens‑Artists Challenge response for the first time, welcome—we’d love to visit your post. To participate, publish your take on this week’s theme, link back to this page, and add the Lens‑Artists tag so others can discover your work. You’ll find more details on how the challenge works here.

John Steiner.