Happy new year everyone!  I hope you each had a wonderful Christmas and new year, and have gotten some needed rest and relaxation. I, for one, am eyeing the calendar and I’m not quite sure I’m ready to go back to work yet! Haha is it okay to admit that?

Last year I made a post at the end of the year that highlighted a few images that I had taken throughout the year, but that hadn’t fit in any particular series.  As I was closing out 2025, looking back at all my images, I noticed more pictures like that.  Pictures that I never got around to making a series with, or that just never fit into what I had been working on – whatever the reason – they never got posted.  I don’t know that I’ll make this a tradition necessarily (though I admittedly really like the idea of it), but I thought I’d do that again this year before kicking off my first image series of 2026.  A cleaning of the slate, if you will.

The picture above is from my family time at the beach.  I didn’t end up taking a lot of pictures there at the beach this year, but on one particular evening Holly and I went exploring and I took my camera with me.  Kiawah Island has these towers that look out over grassland areas, and Holly made it to one of those around golden hour.  The scene above is where the forest meets the wetland area – where the trees stop and the grasses begin.  The light was just absolutely gorgeous, and I loved out the dead tree limbs seemed to be reach out of the forest.

Below you’ll find a number of other images.  I won’t explain them all, but a few I wanted to call out.  This past year Holly and I met one of our neighbors across the street who has an amazing view of the mountains from his property.  I’ve gone over there a couple of times to shoot the sunrise, and on this particular morning his sheep were extra curious as to what I was doing.  I snapped their photo as the sun was rising over the distant mountains and Holly and I have enjoyed this picture so much, we had it printed and are intending to hang it in our living room later in the month.  You’ll also find a picture of a deer.  This one was captured in our own backyard.  The sun was just setting and created a gorgeous yellow glow as the buck was walking off into the tall grass.

The last one I’ll call your attention to is the blueberry.  Holly and I have greatly reduced our garden area down to just fruit plants I like fiddling with.  I’ve struggled with my blueberries for years, but finally got them to do something in 2025, so I decided to go photograph the fruit before I ate it!  The plants made for fun subjects.  The rest are various sunrise type images I captured throughout the year here in the Smokies.

More next week!

–Dan Thompson