2024: Year in Review

2024 has been a wild ride (literally). From Patagonia to Hawaii, the Grand Canyon to high above Louisiana, there were some memorable moments I’ll never forget. The photo industry continues to struggle and this year it felt like it went off a cliff. But regardless of that, I still had some incredible assignments and there were periods where I was insanely busy. 2025 also marks the start of my 30th year as a professional photographer, which is incredibly hard to fathom. I am not sure at the start I would have ever dreamed I would make it this far and looking back it has been an incredible three decades.

Yet again, this year saw me working with the Red Bull Air Force a few times again as well as creating images for the launch of the new FUJIFILM GF 500mm lens. This year I had more gigs with Red Bull than with any other client. They have entrusted me with some very complex assignments and seem to relish in challenging not just their athletes but the photographers and video teams as well in terms of how to actually document the action. As you will see below, this year was all over the map in terms of photographic genres and clients. Without further ado, here are what I consider the best images I have created this year.

FUJIFILM GF500 Launch
Ho’okipa — Maui, Hawaii — USA

In February 2024, I was able to work with a prototype of the FUJIFILM GF500mm lens made specifically for the FUJIFILM GFX medium format cameras. I took the lens out to Maui to photograph some legendary windsurfing icons–namely Marcilio Browne and Levi Siver. Marcilio is the current world champion and has been for the last four years. Levi is a legend in the sport and I have worked with him many times over the last thirteen years as he was sponsored by Red Bull for a long time.

Ho’okipa Beach Park, on the north shore of Maui, is one of the most famous windsurfing spots on the planet. It was the perfect place to test out the GF500mm lens and also to see just how well the autofocus worked with my GFX100 II camera. On this adventure I took both my Nikon Z9 and the GFX100 II along with various lenses–since I only had the GF500 for a few days on my weeklong trip. Hence, the images below were created with both systems. You can find a full review of the GF500mm lens on my blog that also contains many more images created with that lens–some from Patagonia that are also shown farther down in this blog post.

My sincere to thanks to both Marcilio Browne and Levi Siver for working with me on this project. And of course, my sincere thanks to FUJIFILM for letting me test drive the lens in both Maui and Patagonia. The new GF500mm is a fantastic lens, that is still very hard to acquire (because it is in high demand).

Red Bull Air Force Training Camp
Coushatta, Louisiana — USA

Since 2010, I have photographed all of the Red Bull Air Force training camps and earlier this year, in March 2024, I yet again had the honor of working with the Red Bull Air Force out in Louisiana for their latest training camp. As usual, this year’s training camp was a mix of skydiving, stunt planes and aerobatic helicopters each practicing their disciplines. I have been working with the Air Force for fifteen years now, which makes for the longest collaboration with any group of athletes in my entire career. The team members have become good friends over the last fifteen years and we have been on quite a few adventures together.

This year, as usual, I was tasked with getting amazing action images as well as behind the scenes lifestyle shots, studio portraits and also the standard “can in hand” shots showing the athletes drinking the product. As shown below, there are quite a few radical images that were created from various perspectives — many created with remote cameras mounted to the skydiver’s helmets or on the stunt planes. The team photo is always a fun shot and this years was even more complex trying to include a helicopter and two stunt planes in one image (as shown below).

For this year’s portraits, we had a grey seamless background set up in the hangar. I would grab each athlete for five minutes whenever possible over the week and create a variety of portraits. It was also great to have Jon DeVore back in action as well after his accident a few years ago. As can be seen in the portraits below knowing the team members well paid off and they had a lot of fun with the portraits.

Not everything was shot from the ground, on many occasions I was up in the air photographing the action out of Aaron Fitzgerald’s helicopter or riding with Luke Aikins in the experimental Cesna (that had an air break attached to the bottom of it). In some instances, as shown below, the ground was a wild perspective looking straight up at Miles Daisher jumping off the helicopter flown by Aaron Fitzgerald for a stunt where he does a backflip over the incoming plane flown by Kevin Coleman.

The GoPro cameras mounted to helmets and stunt planes are key for a lot of the images I produce with the Red Bull Air Force. Sadly, you can’t mount a full size camera on the stunt planes so the smaller GoPros are all that you can get. The images created by these GoPros are often surprising and out of this world (as shown below). The downside to the GoPros is that they are firing off at two frames per second so you often come back with thousands upon thousands of images to comb through.

One of the coolest adventures I had this entire year was flying with Luke Aikins in the experimental plane the very first time he flew with wingsuit skydivers–check out a BTS video of that here on Instagram. Essentially, my first skydive ever was in the plane with Luke (as shown below). We dropped over 12,000 feet in about thirty-seconds. Red Bull Air Force team members Andy Farrington, Mike Swanson, Jeff Provenzano, and Miles Daisher jumped from the drop plane and flew their wingsuits next to us for most of that time. While these may not be the best images from this year it was certainly one of the wildest rides of the year.

As usual, it is always an honor to work with the Red Bull Air Force. I always say it is like hanging out with Superman and Superwoman. Check out my prior blog post on the 2024 Red Bull Air Force training camp to read more about the adventures we had and see more of the images.

Patagonia
Chile and Argentina

In April 2024, I was able to go back to Chile and Argentina for the seventh time to explore one of my favorite places in the world–Patagonia. On this trip I was co-leading a photography workshop set up by Justin Black and his company Visionary Wild. Justin leads phenomenal workshops and is an incredible photographer as well. This trip was another epic trip this year. We visited both Torres del Paine (Chile) and El Chalten (Argentina) as well as other locations over the course of a couple of weeks. One of the best images I created during the trip is the image below of the Cuernos del Paine in Torres del Paine as seen from Lake Pehoe in southern Chile. The light on this morning was magical–some of the best morning light I have seen in a long time.

I wrote a very long blog post on this Patagonia photography workshop earlier in the year–and there are a plethora of amazing images from that trip but here I will just post the cream of the crop. Hopefully soon I will get to go back and do another project down there. Until then, here are some cherry images from Torres del Paine and El Chalten.

The Blue Supermoon
Composite Images captured in Santa Fe, New Mexico — USA

This August, on the 14th to be exact, there was a blue superman, which also happened to be the Blue Moon as well. I decided to photograph the moon that evening with the thought of compositing the images with some of my skydiving images similar to what I did last year. There were two images in particular that really worked well when I composited the images of the moon with images of Jeff Provenzano of the Red Bull Air Force. The second one seems like a remake of the iconic E.T. movie poster.

Antelope Canyon
Page, Arizona — USA

While on a scout for a Red Bull project (which won’t come out until January 2025) I was able to take a tour of Antelope Canyon on the Navajo Nation. Way back in the 90s I was told about this incredible canyon and given directions to it–back when the parking area was a dirt pullout that could fit two cars at most–and that was if you even knew where it was and that it even existed. At that time I spent hours wandering through the canyon all by myself. That was back in the film days. On this trip, we went through the canyon with literally hundreds of other people and had only moments here and there to create images.

Our guide, Steven, was super knowledgeable and pointed out a ton of great photo opportunities to us along the way. Since we were in the canyon around midday, there were a few beams of lights coming into the canyon (as shown below). I snapped this image with my FUJIFILM GFX100 II. Of note, I have to say the iPhones that everyone else was using in the canyon did a fantastic job of replicating what our eyes could make out in the dark canyon–perhaps even better than my crazy expensive camera. But because I was capturing raw images I could open up the shadows in the post processing to match the iPhone images dynamic range to some degree.

My thanks to Steven, Karen and everyone at the Navajo Nation that we worked with, for such a warm welcome and the opportunity to go to Antelope Canyon again. A few of us also went to Grand Canyon National Park and Horseshoe Bend as well on that scout trip. The desert southwest is always stunning no matter what time of year you visit–though summers can be pretty dang hot.

Oppenheimer
New Mexico Tourism – Los Alamos, New Mexico — USA

This fall, I got a call to do another assignment for New Mexico Tourism. The concept was to photograph an Oppenheimer stand-in in front of various historical sites where the real Robert Oppenheimer would have been back in the 1940s. The actor we worked with was a local who worked at Los Alamos National Labs and was also in a play being put on in Los Alamos this winter. We photographed him in front of Oppenheimers house, at the Fuller Lodge and also in front of the Los Alamos Main Gate (shown below), which is mostly unchanged since it was first built back in the 1940s.

This was certainly a cool idea–meant to capitalize on the Hollywood feature film–and I hope to continue this project and produce some more images in 2025. My thanks to New Mexico Tourism, Los Alamos County, Bill Stengel and of course our Oppenheimer stand in Matthew DeSmith.

Aerobatic Helicopter
Little Colorado River, Grand Canyon — Arizona, USA

Another wild assignment for Red Bull this year was with Aaron Fitzgerald, a legendary helicopter pilot and one of the very few in the world who can do backflips in a helicopter. After years of negotiations, Red Bull got a permit to fly in the Little Colorado River part of the Grand Canyon, which is also on Navajo Nation lands. This assignment was to photograph Aaron doing his aerobatic helicopter routine in and out of the Grand Canyon. As shown below, he did a variety of maneuvers below the rim and above it.

Red Bull had another helicopter on hand for me to shoot out of, which helped greatly to move up and down the canyon and get a variety of images for them. High winds limited our time to get the images required but we managed to get a variety of perspectives in a few hours of flying over two days. All of the close up cockpit and tail perspectives were captured using GoPro cameras, which were the only option for remote mounted cameras (that can shoot continuously at 2 frames per second).

A huge thanks to Red Bull, the Navajo Nation, and Mitch Kelldorf of H5 Helicopters for all your support and help in creating these images. Of course, also a huge thanks to Aaron Fitzgerald for all your efforts and skill. Aaron has become a good friend over the years the years and I have been lucky and blessed to fly with him a lot over the last decade. It is always an honor to work with Aaron and to see his incredible skills on display.

Lower Mesa Falls in National Geographic
Darby McAdams sequence image featured as a double-gate spread

This summer, one of the images I created last year for the launch of the FUJIFILM GFX100 II of whitewater kayaker Darby McAdams, was used as a double-page spread in the June 2024 issue of National Geographic (as shown below). It is always an honor to have an image in National Geographic magazine, but this one was especially fun since it was an image created with FUJIFILM.

The image they chose was a sequence shots that was stitched together in Photoshop to show the lower drop on Lower Mesa Falls in Idaho. I was surprised they went for this one as it is a stitched image–but they made sure to mention that in the caption to let everyone know exactly how it was created. Even though I have worked with National Geographic for many years now it is still pretty cool to see your image show up in the magazine–and it was certainly a highlight of 2024.

Medium Format Magazine
A feature article on my work with Medium Format Cameras

Also this June, I had a feature Q&A article about my work published in Medium Format Magazine. The article (as the magazine name might suggest) was specifically about my work using medium format cameras and how I have created adventure images using that format. The article, with a 33-page layout, was a mix of questions and answers along with quite a few images

Medium Format Magazine is quite unique in that it is dedicated to an elite genre of photography and the cameras used to create that work. As an e-magazine, they also have quite a bit of freedom with the layout and can really dive into each story with no worries about the layout or the printing costs. This is the new world version of a genre specific magazine–and they seem to be doing it quite well. Especially now that very few (if any) photography magazines are even still going, it is great to see a beautifully put together magazine like this thrive. My thanks to Olaf Sztaba for tracking me down and featuring me in the magazine. If you would like to check out Medium Format Magazine visit their website for details on how to subscribe.

So long 2024. My thanks to Red Bull, Fujifilm, National Geographic, New Mexico Tourism, Visionary Wild and all of my other clients with whom I worked this year. Thank you for taking the time to check out some of this year’s highlights. Feel free to comment on any of these images and tell me which one you think is the best of the best from this year. Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year to you all. Here’s hoping your 2025 is filled with even more adventurous travels and amazing experiences!