Here’s a tilt shift version of this photo from the summer.

This photo is a cropped selection of this larger panorama of the skyline of Prague, Czech Republic.

Tilt shift photography usually involves an expensive lens that enables the camera to “tilt” the focus to create a tiny depth of field. It is often creates an artificial perception of miniturization, for example this photo from last year’s Tour de France. I’ve always enjoyed these images, but the resources have always been out of reach.  I’ve been playing around in photoshop and have found I can greatly improve bland images by artifically narrowing the focus.  Going through my archives, I’m hopefully going to dedicate the next week to tilt-shift images.

It’s another wonderful year and, in keeping with tradition, here are a few stories that tickled me in 2025. See previous editions linked here: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.

5) The Star Tribune: Minnesota’s ‘Queen of Walleye’ raises millions of fish in a DNR basement

Nice to see a spotlight on some quiet and diligent work happening behind something I took for granted — I didn’t even know those jobs were there:

With only an old fan to move the humid air, fungus spreads easily inside the state’s oldest fish hatchery, she explained, so she must perform the delicate task of separating more than 20,000 eggs.

By the end of this year, Furtner and her staff of just one other person will have raised about 42,000 muskies and 6 million walleye to stock Minnesota lakes. Described by Gov. Tim Walz as the “Queen of Walleye,” Furtner sometimes works at all hours to keep the old hatchery running.

4) Colossal: Dennis Lehtonen Documents a Pair of Immense Icebergs Paying a Visit to a Small Greenland Village

I used to love tilt-shift photography and this has a similar effect of messing with your expectations of scale — requires a click to fully understand and appreciate:

When he arrived in Innaarsuit, he heard about an incident in 2018 when the village of around 160 Inuit residents had to be fully evacuated due to a giant iceberg settling near the shore. Estimated to have been around 100 meters high, its presence threatened people’s safety due to the dangers of pieces breaking off and causing waves large enough to hit some of the coastal houses. While inherently a tense situation, it was also astonishing to see, and Lehtonen couldn’t help being curious “what it would look like to have a skyscraper made of ice on your backyard.”

3) Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends: The endless internal struggle of phone photography

This visual essay made me smile because it reminded me of my own visit to the Mona Lisa (crowds).

2) ESPN: How Dan Snyder views Commanders’ title run from afar: ‘He … hates it’

As a former football fan who grew up in DC and watched the championship team of my youth slowly fall apart, I can only say how much I enjoy a thoroughly reported and sourced investigation like this:

At the London dinner, Snyder, 60, was polite, if not subdued, and did things the associates had come to expect, such as ordering almost everything on the menu. Snyder said that he was enjoying a quiet existence, mostly in London. Life was better for his family, far from the controversies that had engulfed him and the team the past several years. Talk inevitably turned to the improving Commanders, already off to a strong start. When one associate returned to the United States, a colleague asked him the question that’s been on the minds of many fans and league executives:

What’s it like for Snyder, for years the most hated owner in sports, to watch the Commanders succeed without him?

1) The Bell: Magnet fishing is supposed to be a wholesome hobby. Why all the beef?

Just days into the new year and I was dredging up my Scottish slang dictionary just to make it through this article. What a treat:

Halfway across the bridge, just about visible in the biblical downpour, there’s something submerged in the water. Follow it upwards, and a man in a fluorescent jacket is leaning over the side, dangling a rope into the swirling current, sweeping it across the river bed in search of silt-buried treasure.

Stirling is an unlikely location for Glasgow Magnet Fishing (GMF), a ragtag, piratical group of friends bonded since the halcyon days of lockdown by one thing: a love of lobbing high-powered magnets on ropes into waterways to retrieve discarded metal objects. In recent years, they’ve grown in size — the Facebook group totals almost 7,700 members — and reputation, even producing merch. […]

“What’s that, a chibber, oan yer first throw an aw?” McGeachin shouts over to Glasgow Magnet Fishing OG, Paul Goody, a hulking joiner with a gentle nature. He wanders over to see. Goody shows him the 1954 military pocketknife. “Finders keepers, this one,” Goody says joyfully, hastening to assure me: “Any big blades we hand it into the police.”

I’m generally opposed to photographs that are made to look gritty and degrade the image quality, such as lens flares, scratches or other effects. However, I was intrigued to hear about ‘freelensing‘ or ‘free lensing‘ because it yielded some interesting results with very shallow depths of field and extended macro abilities. I’m a big fan of tilt-shift photography and so I decided to give this a try. Apologies for light leaking into the lens and the oddly blurry images, it’s a natural side effect.