Favorite Shots of 2020

With 2020 in the rearview mirror, it’s time to look back in my annual artist’s recap of the prior year.

First, 2019 wasn’t an ideal year for me. My summary in my 2019 post bluntly stated, “In 2019, that forward momentum stalled. It stalled so much that this has been one of my most challenging years artistically, socially, personally and mentally.”

Any maybe you can guess how 2020 went?

It was exhausting.

The big news of the year was COVID-19, like I needed to tell you that. Like with everyone, it impacted me significantly. I remember shortly after when I first heard about it in January of 2020, I was sitting in Subway eating lunch and had this crazy feeling that this might be the last casual lunch that I had without worrying about COVID-19. That was January 27th — almost a full year ago as I write this. I also remember the president saying, “We have it totally under control.” How wrong he was, and how right I was.

Anyway, we all know about it. It sucks. I’m not going to dwell on how bad the federal response was and how bad many in this country behaved, but COVID-19 hurt.

How bad? I don’t like to talk about income, but I’ll be open here. I lost about 60% of my income directly due to cancelled workshops, speaking events, sales, portrait bookings, 1:1 workshops, folded magazine columns and more. When you calculate in the additional impact of lost potential bookings due to reschedules or people filling spaces on workshops with their credits, I lost approximately 70% of my income due to COVID-19.

To make up for that, I pivoted my business online as quickly as I could. I ended up running five online workshops and doing several webinars. After Minnesota allowed workshops again, I managed to create new workshops and fill them. Fans of my work increased print purchases, sent donations, including several very generous gifts. Facebook also started a Supporter’s Group that allows people to support my daily pictures for $5 a month. You can sign up here: https://www.facebook.com/becomesupporter/122323837827341/

After everything was said and done, I had a 37% decrease in income. I did manage to get a PPP loan which allowed me to keep working during the lockdown and develop those online classes and webinars, and I also managed to get some unemployment. Once those are factored in it’s about a 20% decrease.

To help offset some of that loss, I’ve also spent much of the year selling old outdoor equipment and old camera equipment. I’ve sold a significant amount of my personal gear that I’ve accumulated over the years. Just today someone on Facebook saw I was selling something else and asked, “Will you have anything left after you’re done selling all this?”

But that’s not all!

Much of my loss is deferred. This is where it gets a little weird. I lucked out in that most of my workshop students ended up taking credits instead of asking for refunds — towards the end of the year I had cash flow to do some refunds. Many of those credits were used to book 2021 classes. When that’s accounted for, my 2021 is already down three months worth of work. The weird thing is that many of the credits were actually taken as deposits in 2019 and much of the rebound came from deposits taken in 2020 for 2021 classes. So, if 2021 classes have to be cancelled, I take a huge hit.

Anyway, I worked my butt off and made up for some of the loss, but last year’s losses have already impacted this year. If there are anymore lockdowns, then this year will be bad as well. I suppose I should get another PPP loan to help, because I do qualify. But I hated doing that. That’s probably more than you wanted to know about the business side of being a landscape photographer.

The worst part of COVID-19 had nothing to do with the business side. I lost my grandma to COVID-19. She was diagnosed on Christmas Eve and passed away on New Year’s Day.

2020 was exhausting and sad, and I’m glad it is over.

Was there any good?

Yes. Despite having the economic impacts and personal losses, we have been distance learning my kid the entire year and will likely continue that until summer. That has meant that we’ve spent a lot of time together as a family. I’ve really enjoyed it even though it has been hard.

My travel was down from about 100 days a year on the road to a week in Door County last February before COVID-19 took hold. While I love being on the road, being home was awesome. It allowed us to get closer as a family. We took multiple Boundary Waters trips and spent a lot of time together as a family exploring our property and the local forest.

I also produced six YouTube videos. You should subscribe to my channel, like all my videos and comment and such. My channel is https://www.youtube.com/bryanhansel

The most popular video was the one I did on the Ricoh GRIII.

I also put out a fun little zine that you can get here: The Landscape Photography ‘Zine.

If you’ve followed my work and life through these updates in the past, you know that in 2016 I joined a political party and was elected chair of the local unit. Last year, I was also elected vice chair of a regional unit. My local unit swung our county towards our candidate by one of the largest margins in the state of Minnesota. To be honest, we won. I’m proud of the work that I did, and it was a relief off my shoulders when we won. I’m now in the process of resigning my positions and going back to just being an artist for awhile.

Was there anything middle-of-the-road?

Yes. I’m in the middle of switching camera systems. I started in 2019 and was planning on getting everything switched in 2020. This put me in a bind. My camera system was a mess and I needed to spend some money on new equipment, which wasn’t ideal consider the losses I was taking. But there was no way around it. In the end, I sold a lot of equipment that in a normal year I wouldn’t have sold. This helped to fund the purchase of new photography equipment to get me into a usable enough of a system to be able to sell more photography equipment and do most of the photos that I like to do. I’m down some lenses that I wish I would have kept, but what I have is fully functional again. I still have a bunch of equipment that I need to sell. You can see it in my garage sale page. You can see my current equipment list here: https://www.bryanhansel.com/about/gear-books/

Anyway, the year was exhausting. It sucked. There was some good. Let’s see the numbers.

Here are the annual photography statistics:

• Number of 3-star and above images in 2019: 316
• Number of 3-star and above images in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019: 478, 417, 353, 507, 523, 437
• Number of 5-star images: 5
• Number of images that I kept: 13,448 (This will likely go down by 2,000 to 6,000 images. Due to distance learning I have not had the time to do a proper culling of images).
• Number of total images in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019: 16,711, 18,461, 18,296, 13,318
• Worst month: April with 149 (compared to 844 images in 2019)

What about being an artist? Did my work grow or what?

I’m not sure how to evaluate this question this year. I took a lot of pictures that I love. I got some of my best fall color pictures of the area. I loved shooting skipper butterflies. I also made some epic canoe shots.

I made a few most favorite shots of my life in certain categories: bloodroot flower, macro insect (not included here), night sky due to NEOWISE, canoe sunset, and a fall color shot. It’s funny that some don’t appear in my selections below due to a technicality. For the selection, I always pick one photo from each month that qualifies as my favorite from that month.

I felt like the overall quality of what I’ve shot is a bit higher than last year. I’m happyish with the work I’ve done, but not the volume.

Still, that’s not bad. But, I feel pretty numb. It’s almost like there’s a mental block that is stopping me from looking back at 2020 and really evaluating what happened for me artistically. When I think about it, everything just kind of goes blank. It’s really a weird feeling, like I have no ability to look into the past right now.

My Favorite Images of 2020

Here are my favorite 12 images from 2020. There’s one from each month. April’s image would have never made the pick in any normal year, but I didn’t have much to pick from.