Casa Cabeza: Favorite Photos of 2019

Happy New Year, everyone!

This has been a year in which Sally and I have mostly kept on keeping on. Arguably the biggest changes in my life were my decision to commit to skiing more last winter, taking up photography early in the summer, and writing a Hell of a lot for As For Football.

This post is most obviously about the photography. However, it's influenced by all three. First, I wrote so much for AFF that there's really not enough material from the blog to do a best-of retrospective for 2019. That's been a long-running series here, and I'm sad to skip it, but there's just not much point. Luckily, I have these pictures to show, so it's not a total wash. A good number of these come from shots taken for AFF, so before we bemoan the lack of additional writing, it's worth remembering that the As For Football crew sent me to a heck of a lot of really fun football games this year.

That's not nothing.

The one regret that I have with this is that it's tough to show size and aspect ratios via the blog. Some of these ought to be shown big and others are just wide or skinny. None of that comes across in this format. I'd like to have a little show in our backyard, but that's definitely a project for the spring or early summer. Paired with beer tasting and a friendly audience, it could be fun. We'll see.

Let me just say, too, that I don't know that I'm necessarily good at this. However, I enjoy it, and I've never been shy about showing my work to others.

For all of these, you can click the pics to them at full size.

Housatonic Boat Club

The Housatonic Boat Club is the oldest yacht club in the state of Connecticut. Despite that rather serious sounding description, it's both right down the street from our house and not at all fancy in its lifestyle. We've been members for a few years, though the only boats we keep there are kayaks.

I took most of these during an early summer heat wave. We sweated it out at the club with my friend Dave and his daughter Julia. Dave was especially patient with me as I tried to learn the camera I'd just bought used via Amazon.

Saint Thomas

I finally took Sally on that vacation she's been wanting forever. We went to Saint Thomas. We took millions of pictures, but most of these were from before I started trying to learn composition. However, I filtered my favorites, so maybe they count?

This is my favorite shot from this series.

Overlooking Honeymoon Beach

New York

These are shots from my daily life, taken and filtered on my phone.

Harlem 125th Street. The candy colors are deliberately juxtaposed with the little homeless camp in the lower right corner.

The pier on the Upper West Side, off the Hudson Greenway.

Rhode Island

We went to Rhode Island twice on short camping trips. We took the girls once, and Sally and I went once by ourselves. We visited Newport Beach both times.

This shot of Emma is a personal favorite.

Skiing & Mount Snow

We love Mount Snow so much that we went up once over the summer for a beer festival. I took literally hundreds of pictures.

My two favorite things to shoot are ski lifts and lifeguard chairs.

The rare really cool selfie.

This isn't Mount Snow. It's Magic Mountain.

Army Football

At Rice. Class of 95 and family.

Jumping in the game ball on opening night.

My wife took these next two:

Yearling QB Jabari Laws

Army quarterback Kelvin Hopkins didn't have a particularly good season. However, he is an insanely photogenic guy, especially when he's playing well. I have maybe a dozen pictures of him from the season that I really like. Here are a couple that demonstrate who he can be when he's really on his game.

Hopkins has a career in the Army in his immediate future, but he could probably get work as a model if he wanted to. It may sound weird, but I honestly believe he could be the next Adam Driver.