Aug 17, 2016; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; A BMX demonstration group performs prior to competition at Olympics BMX Centre during the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games.

One of the most challenging aspects of covering a major sporting event for a professional photographer is coming away with images that are unique to you. Back in August, during my coverage of the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics, things were no different. I often found myself in photo positions shoulder to shoulder with 20 or more photographers, most of them shooting on the same digital camera bodies and using the exact same lenses as myself. The result? Everyone walks away with essentially the same photo. For tightly-cropped finish line jubilation or dejection, sometimes being in “the pack” is a necessary evil at the games. To walk away from the experience with something unique, however

For the past several years, whenever I’ve sat down to begin selecting my favorite images for this year-end blog, I’ve gotten an overwhelming feeling of worry. I’ve always second-guessed whether I’ve shot enough things throughout the year that stand out enough to be featured together in a best-of collection. Typically, my worries go unfounded, and I’m left struggling to narrow down 50 or more of my favorite images to a palatable selection.

This year, however, was different. As I culled my images (iPhone included) from 2015, I realized that I shot significantly less stills assignments than in previous years, and in the end, I was left with only a handful of images that I felt a personal connection to. This was, of course, discouraging. Nobody wants to realize that one of the things they’re most passionate about slipped away from them a bit, and on the surface, this it exactly how it would appear.

I later realized there was a good reason behind having a lesser amount of images to chose my favorites from. First, my stills work in 2015 shifted towards a different clientele. Three or four years ago, editorial work used to keep me busy with three or four assignments per weekend. I found myself this year shooting more for commercial and corporate clients a handful of times per month. While this may seem like a negative thing at first, the commercial and corporate work has proved to be far, far more lucrative for my business. In short, I’m working less and making more.

Tazia Williams poses in her makeup and costume for the musical “Cats” at the Hammond Academy for Performing Arts in Hammond, Ind., Saturday, March 14, 2015.

Secondly, the lighting design part of my business saw a dramatic increase in work over the past year. I was happy to be retained by R&B singer Anthony Hamilton as his full time designer, traveling across the United States more than 26 times this year to light his performances in a variety of venues. In addition to work with Anthony, I also traveled to Dallas this summer for a week with the lighting crew from Live International to program and tech at pastor T.D. Jakes’ bi-annual Megafest convention. All that lighting design work was in addition to designing shows for my regular clients back home!

With so much travel and time this year devoted to the craft of lighting for the live stage (which was always my first passion), the downturn in stills assignments started to make more sense. As much as I’d like to be some mutant creature with eight arms and four brains, I have to occasionally face the reality that I can only be in one place at one time.

Snow swirls in the front yard of a house at Magoun Ave. and 143rd St. in East Chicago, Ind., during Winter Storm Linus early Monday, February 2, 2015.

Portraits and nature dominate the images I’m most proud of from 2015. From running home to document crazy cloud formations in my neighborhood sky, to staking out lightning in the middle of the night near a 33-foot-tall steel statue (probably not my wisest moment), Mother Nature offered up some great looks for my lenses this year. And, with so much more of my client-based work being commercial, it’s natural that portraits were something I was asked to create fairly regularly too.

Lyft ride-sharing service driver Angelica Griffin in downtown Chicago, Ill., Tuesday, March 24, 2015. Griffin, originally from Georgia, is studying for her law degree at DePaul University.

My favorite portrait is the one above of Angelica Griffin driving her car through the streets of Chicago (shot on assignment for the ride-sharing service Lyft). I suction-cupped a Canon 6D with a 15mm

Snow blows through the air above St. Nicholas Church in East Chicago, Ind., early Monday, February 2, 2015. The image was created by back-lighting the church with a 600 w/s strobe, fired remotely via a PocketWizard unit.

I’m not sure what it is about major snow emergencies that gets my creative juices pumping, but during the bad winter storms we’ve had over the past few years, I’ve repeatedly gotten the urge to gear up and make some unique visuals amidst Mother Nature’s chaos. Some of you might remember my Vapor Chill video from last year, where I lit clouds that formed from tossing boiling water into the frigid air. There was also my Snowpocalypse Voicemail Remix from 2011, where I juxtaposed my friend Jeff Grafton’s message about his power going out with doomsday footage of the blizzard from around my neighborhood.

With Winter Storm Linus, which rolled into the Chicago area late Saturday night, I was struck not only with the amount of snow we received in a 24 hour period, but with how the snow was whipped through the air by the bitterly cold north winds. I was in awe as I watched the snow swirl high in the gusty air overhead, sailing downward an instant later to twirl through the streets in tiny vortices. I decided that focusing on the snow’s interaction with the wind and the air aloft specifically would make the best images this time around.

With a nod to one of my favorite photographers, O. Winston Link, I decided to wait until nightfall and use a strobe to backlight the snow in the air, where it would be isolated against the dark sky. With the monochromatic snow dominating my frames, as well as the contrasty lighting technique I’d employ, black and white was the clear choice for my final edits.

I set out with an Elinchrom Style 600 monolight (600 w/s) with a 50 degree sport reflector, mounted to a 24″ c-stand for added stability in the wind. The unit was powered with a Paul C. Buff Vagabond Lithium Extreme unit, and triggered with PocketWizard Plus remotes. I used a combination of Ziploc bags and ClingWrap to protect the electronics from the snow. The images were shot with a Canon 6D body and a Canon 17-40mm

Bronwyn Coffeen and John David Mercer pose for a wet plate collodion portrait on their wedding day in Mobile, Ala., Saturday, July 19, 2014. The 8×10 tintype image was produced using a vintage 1896 view camera with an 1880 brass petzval lens.

The technical journey photography has taken me on over the past twenty years has been nothing short of remarkable. I’ve gone from shooting 35mm film on a Canon AE-1 for the Block Jr. High yearbook, to shooting on my first digital camera in high school that had a whopping 1/3 megapixel (yes, one-third of one megapixel) resolution, to clacking away at ten frames-per-second on the latest Canon 1-series digital bodies. While digital technology has allowed me to obtain images that would have been impossible to capture as cleanly on any other format, there’s something about the digital workflow that lacks soul. I can’t hold 1’s and 0’s in my hand. I can’t accidentally drop and scratch a .jpeg file. I can’t smell a histogram.

Last May, I decided to get back to my roots with learning the process of shooting and developing large-format 4×5 film. I’d hoped that the 4×5 process would free me from the ultra-predictability of the digital world, giving me images rich with flaws (yes, I wanted flaws) and organic errors. To my surprise, I discovered that the Tri-X 320 film I was shooting, once scanned, was actually superior to my digital cameras in terms of resolution and sharpness. As for those flaws I’d hoped for? Well, the film images were pretty technically solid aside from the errant scratch or two from loading my holders.

While spending most of that summer ruminating on why I couldn’t mess up film more, I stumbled upon the wet plate collodion work of photographer Ian Ruhter. The ghostly images Ruhter was capturing, filled with cloudy streaks, lines, and vignettes, were exactly what I was after when I embarked on my 4×5 film foray. Interestingly, the wet plate process wasn’t completely foreign to me. I’d previously seen the work of wet plate photographer Robert Szabo at a civil war reenactment I shot in Gettysburg in 2009. At the time, however, I’d written-off the process as something entirely too complicated and dangerous for me to take on. Seeing Ruhter and his team working in their many videos, however, re-ignited my interest in the format, and I knew immediately it was something I had to learn.

Learning the wet plate collodion process from photographer Thomas Gibson at his studios in Lecompton, Kansas, on October 12, 2013.

Months later, I found myself in the middle of the remote Kansas prairie at the studios of Thomas Gibson for a day-long wet plate workshop. Gibson and his assistant took me through the entire process, from preparing the necessary chemistry from scratch, to shooting and developing plates, to varnishing them for a lifetime or more of enjoyment. Learning the technical caveats (of which there are many) of the process, of course, is something that requires far more practice than a day-long workshop can provide, but the workshop put me far ahead of the many beginner’s mistakes I would have undoubtedly made without that training. Perfecting the process is something that takes many years, and working towards that perfection is what is so fun about the art form.

In a nutshell, wet plate photography is a lot like the 4×5 film photography that led me to it. Light sensitive aluminum or glass plates (which you create on the spot) are exposed in the camera, developed using liquid developer, stopped, fixed, and washed.