My Best Shots of 2025
A vintage Range Rover is parked at a dramatic angle in front of a liush Los Feliz home
In 2025, my camera kept getting pulled toward the same kinds of stories, even when the subjects looked totally different at first glance.
Most of these images are pure LA: chrome bumpers, palm trees, and the geometry of media-friendly neighborhoods.
Some are road-trip artifacts: Arizona sunlight, a truck that feels like a biography, a tiny home on wheels.
And even the Midwest shows up: a memory you can almost touch: snow, farm country, and hoofed fauna.
Here are my favorite shots from the year past, each tied to a place, a theme, or an obsession I kept coming back to.
A teardrop trailer doubles as a Summer home for the proprietor of this Arizona resale shop and gallery
I had a long conversation with the woman who runs this curious place after stopping there to buy a gifts for family.
A former motor hotel along Arizona’s once-thriving highway 60, its rooms now serve as gallery-like spaces for an elaborate cast of art objects and knick-knacks she’s hand curated over time and space.
She told me tales of hauling the little teardrop behind her car on road trips across the Southwest, up into Northern California and back. What an adventure!
A mechanic kneels down to work on a client’s car at Sublime Silverlake, a Porsche specialty shop
LA is a hotbed for performance car ownership, but this specialty independent auto shop focuses on a single marque: Porsche.
Models like this classic, air-cooled 911 share lift space with modern family tourers, all of which seem to sprawl out of the bustling bay doors on Fountain Ave.
This convergence of blocks seems ready to service many a European road warrior, as there’s Hi-Tech Automotive across the street, and 5 Speed Motors just down from it.
A Japanese whisky bottle and cigar adorn the interior of a JDM model luxury touring sedan at a car show
One of my favorite places to shoot are car shows, and I gravitate toward models that tell a deeper story about their owners, and their origin.
This 90s era Toyota Century was once at the height of Japanese luxury motor touring, and its current owner expresses that history with a few simple bits of decor.
I imagine a stoic Japanese business executive or grisled Yakusa boss lounging back here, sipping whiskey from the Samurai decanter while taking slow puffs off the cigar.
A designer-exotic Savannah cat rests on the boot of an equally exotic Italian sports car
The whole frame feels like a wink at status, taste, and the theatrical side of car culture. But that’s all part of the marketing.
‘Cats and Cars’ is a niche lifestyle subgenre that smashes crypto, supercars, and exotic cats together into one brand.
Women show up at car shows behind the wheel of Ferraris, wearing Gucci sunglasses and D&G purses, while 4-to-5 figure value Savanah cats (bred from illegal-to-own-in-California wild Servals and domestic cats) ride on their laps and pose for Instagram photos.
A 1920s adobe-style home, a perfect example of the Spanish-revival residential architecture of early Los Angeles, sits in stark contrast to a modern, multi-unit luxury apartment next door
I’ve lived around LA for nearly 30 years and have long struggled to capture its essence in a single frame. This may finally be it.
This is the story of Los Angeles at its simplest: early 20th century history holding its ground as a brutalist future leans in.
What might shock you most is looking up the value of the 1,000 ft² little adobe house on the left.
A family admires a classic 1960s Chevrolet at a car show
I love the way car shows become pop-up museums where the exhibit is nostalgia and the docents are just damn-proud car owners.
Here that idea plays out across what seems to be three distinct generations of one family, all of whom can’t help but look like excited little boys caught in the enchanting gleam of a crowd-pleaser Chevy Impala.
A ubiquitous Los Angeles Metro bus drops off morning-shift workers at a medical building in Hollywood
Beneath the glitz and glamour there is the completely essential: a large population in need of world-class medical facilities, and a workforce needed to staff them.
This is the city running like clockwork while everyone else is just looking at the Hollywood sign.
But it, too, can be beautiful.
The signagture Sky Tower at Six Flags Magic Mountain is seen between the facades of homes in a new housing development built directly behind the park
David Bryne once described Valencia as less a real city and something more like a film set that grew out of control; and where people decided to stay anyway to raise their kids (and just in case it’s ambiguous, this was in no way a compliment).
As someone on the inside of this very real phenomenon, this shot came out feeling in-on-the-joke but also slightly unsettling, as if entertainment and real life have been irrevocably spliced together.
Car enthusiasts mingle behind a late model Ford GT, one of America’s few true modern supercars
I like this shot because the Ford was an absolute eyeball magnet amongst all the German and Italian supercars, but the real subject is the community orbiting around it.
Of course there’s the coincidence of someone wearing a Charlie Kirk shirt, the public speaker who’s murder had happened just weeks prior, and whose cultural legacy was already showing up in droves.
An empty parking lot around a San Fernando Valley WalMart, shortly before it underwent a major renovation
Trees feel like the only “customers” in a Walmart parking lot, seen shortly before it was slated for a major urban renewal project meant to revitalize the long suffering retail corridor of Panorama City.
It’s a quiet frame about change that’s already on the way, even if nothing’s moving yet.
A perfect example of the iconic American work truck sits in front a suburban home in Santa Clarita
It’s humble, practical, and oddly heroic, because it’s built to do stuff, not to be looked at.
Nobody organizes car shows around these things, but somebody ought to.
I know plenty of guys who’d show up with bells on.
A car enthusiast admires a row of multi-colored Porsche 911 convertibles at a car show
Like many a photographer before me, I’m drawn to repetition.
Only I prefer it with variation, like the same song played in different keys.
Here an everyman serves as avatar for the viewer; like a character in a video game getting ready to pick which color car to drive through an open-world sandbox.
A Studebaker truck rests between hauls beside a home well stocked for the Winter in one of Northern Arizona’s rural mountain towns
One of many examples of me seeing a perfect scene whilst driving along and then pulling over madly to capture it before the light changes, or the homeowner decides to move something.
This one feels like a short story: work, weather, and a life built around self-reliance.
The driver of a late model Porsche considers places to park at a car show
I like shots like this because they puncture the fantasy.
Even surrounded by dream machines, you still have to find a place to park.
Only here it’s a woman who seems to have conflicting thoughts about parking in front of a Dukes of Hazzard themed show car.
A Volvo convertible awaits its driver outside an example of Palm Springs adobe revival architecture
Palm Springs is at the wrong end of its era as tourist destination.
This I saw demonstrated by a man curled up sleeping in the doorway of an abandoned shop just around the corner from this view.
But nothing says downbeat luxury quite like a P80 Volvo C70, once the spiritual successor to the tv-famous P1800 ‘Saint Car’, now a quirky Swedish ragtop for a decidedly post-yuppie persona.
Horses feed in a snow covered field at a farmhouse in Fon du Lac, Wisconsin
One of the last handful of shots I took in December of ‘25, this one’s the opposite of all the year’s shiny car-show energy, and that’s exactly why it belongs here.
It’s all soft, quiet permanence and austere landscape.
And it’s a place not far from where my family all came up.
Closing thought
If there’s a single thread across these 17 frames, it’s this: I’m always chasing the intersection of identity and environment, what we build, what we preserve, and the small rituals that keep life moving.
See you next year, until then I’ll be out shootin’.
