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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

“Do you ever wonder how many times your life is gonna end? Like how many people you’re

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.