This collection gathers 36 standout photographs from 2018 by wildlife specialists, street photographers, landscape artists and travellers. It includes the overall winner of Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2018, Kevin Ebi's eagle-and-fox chase that went viral that summer, a newborn surrounded by the needles of her mother's IVF treatment, and a stranger's proposal on a Yosemite cliff that led to a nationwide search for the couple.
The pictures are grouped by theme rather than ranked. Some are documentary images of real events, such as California's record fire season. Others are carefully constructed studio or digital works, from betta-fish portraits to smartphone illusions. Both kinds belong in a portrait of a year in photography, but they make different promises: a news photograph records what happened, while a staged portrait shows what the artist wanted you to notice.
Each caption explains what the photograph shows, who made it and why it stood out. Where a location or detail could not be confirmed, the caption says so rather than guessing. Every photographer is credited with links to their own websites and social accounts, which are the best places to see more of their work and to license it properly.
Wildlife moments that went around the world
Kevin Ebi captured a bald eagle trying to snatch a rabbit from a young red fox on San Juan Island, Washington, in the summer of 2018. Instead of letting go, the fox clung on and was briefly carried into the air before the eagle dropped it, and both predators survived. The sequence became one of the most widely shared wildlife images of the year.
Dutch photographer Marsel van Oosten won the overall title of Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2018 with The Golden Couple, a portrait of two golden snub-nosed monkeys in the Qinling Mountains of China. The species is endangered and found only in China, and the pair's golden fur stands out against the dark forest.
Canadian photojournalist Jo-Anne McArthur, founder of the We Animals project, photographed Pikin, a rescued lowland gorilla, in the arms of her caretaker Appolinaire Ndohoudou at the Ape Action Africa sanctuary in Cameroon. Pikin was being moved to a new enclosure when the sedation wore off early. The image won the People's Choice award at the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition announced in early 2018.
Sergey Gorshkov (Facebook)
An Arctic fox carries an egg in its jaws in this close-up by Russian wildlife photographer Sergey Gorshkov, who has spent years documenting the Russian Arctic. In summer, foxes raid the nesting colonies of geese and other birds and bury surplus eggs to eat later, a habit that helps them survive the long winter.
Barbara Jensen Vorster (Instagram)
A lioness walks off with a photographer's camera and long lens in her mouth, credited here to Barbara Jensen Vorster. Curious big cats in safari parks and reserves sometimes investigate gear left within reach. The image is a gentle reminder of whose territory the visitors are in.
British wildlife photographer George Wheelhouse photographed a white reindeer stepping through a snowy landscape so pale that the animal almost disappears. White reindeer are a rare colour variation, not albinos, and in Scandinavian folklore they are associated with good luck. Deliberate over-exposure, known as high-key photography, gives the image its minimal look.
Willis Chung (Website)
Willis Chung photographed a bison bull charging through a cloud of dust or steam in a grassland edged by pines. Bison roll and paw the ground to shed insects and mark territory, especially during the summer rut. The animal's mass and the backlit cloud make an image of raw power.
Portraits of animals at home and in the studio
A polar bear rests on its forelegs in fresh snow and looks straight at the lens, by British travel photographer George Turner. Polar bears depend on sea ice to hunt seals, which is why they became the most familiar face of climate-change coverage in 2018. A calm, eye-level portrait like this one shows the animal as an individual rather than a symbol.
Czech photographer Kristýna Kvapilová specialises in dogs, and this brindle corgi puppy glancing back over its shoulder in the snow is typical of her soft, low-angle style. Shooting at the animal's eye level and using a wide aperture to blur the background are the two techniques that make pet portraits like this feel intimate.
A scruffy small dog lies on a white studio backdrop in this black-and-white portrait by photographer Shayan Asgharnia. Treating an ordinary mixed-breed dog with the same lighting used for human portraits gives it surprising character and dignity.
French-born, New York-based photographer Sophie Gamand created the Pit Bull Flower Power series, portraits of shelter pit bulls wearing flower crowns. The project set out to soften the breed's image and help the dogs find homes.
Thai photographer Visarute Angkatavanich is known for studio portraits of Siamese fighting fish, or bettas. This pale fish with a flowing tail resembles silk or a ballgown. Betta varieties have been selectively bred in Thailand for centuries, and Angkatavanich photographs them in small tanks with carefully controlled light.
Geert Weggen, a Dutch photographer based in Sweden, is known for photographing wild red squirrels in elaborate little sets in his garden. Here a squirrel stretches between two lupine stems as if doing the splits. The squirrels visit freely, attracted by nuts, and Weggen often waits hours for a single pose.
Landscapes, deserts and night skies
In October 2018 photographer Matthew Dippel was at Taft Point in Yosemite National Park when he captured a couple getting engaged on a rocky outcrop above the valley. He did not know who they were, so he posted the picture online and asked for help finding them. The post spread widely and the couple were identified within days, a reminder of how social media can turn a stranger's snapshot into a shared story.
Lukas Furlan photographed a salt flat whose crust has cracked into a honeycomb of polygons beneath a sunlit red mountainside. These shapes form when water evaporates and the salt crust expands and buckles at the edges. Shooting low and wide makes the foreground pattern lead the eye toward the mountains.
Daniel Kordan, a landscape photographer known for astrophotography, made this star-trail image above a quiver tree and boulders in southern Namibia. The circular trails are the result of many long exposures combined, recording the Earth's rotation around the south celestial pole. Quiver trees are a giant aloe, named for the hollowed branches once used to carry arrows.
Michael T. Meyers photographed a lone figure on the rim of Horseshoe Bend near Page, Arizona, where the Colorado River curls around a sandstone outcrop about 300 metres below. A blazing sunset sky and the small human figure emphasise the scale. The viewpoint became so popular that a railed overlook was added in 2018.
“Transport the Soul” by Brad Goldpaint (Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram)
Transport the Soul by Brad Goldpaint shows a person standing on a canyon edge beneath a glowing moon and the Milky Way. Goldpaint is known for night landscapes in the American West that blend several exposures to show both the sky and the land in detail.
Grey Chow made this star-trail image of a lit hillside monastery beneath snow-capped mountains, a scene that resembles Key Monastery in India's Spiti Valley. Long exposures turn the stars into streaks, while the warm lights of the buildings anchor the frame. High, dry Himalayan valleys are favoured by astrophotographers for their clear skies.
Jon Carmichael photographed the total solar eclipse of 21 August 2017 from a window seat on a commercial flight above Oregon. The image shows the darkened sun above the curve of the land and the thin blue band of the atmosphere. It was widely shared again in 2018 as one of the most unusual eclipse photographs ever made.
Patterns seen from above and up close
Lin Chen/2018 Sony World Photography Awards (Sony World Photography Awards)
An aerial view by Lin Chen, recognised in the 2018 Sony World Photography Awards, shows dozens of blue boats packed side by side along a curving shoreline. From above, everyday working boats become a pattern that resembles petals or feathers. Drone and aerial photography grew rapidly in competitions that year as equipment became cheaper and lighter.
German photographer Tom Hegen shoots salt evaporation ponds from the air for his Salt Series. The pinks and oranges come from salt-tolerant microorganisms such as algae that change colour as the salinity of each pond rises. From above, an industrial site reads like an abstract painting.
Japanese photographer Ryota Kajita lives in Alaska and photographs the frozen surfaces of puddles and ponds for his Ice Forms series. Trapped air bubbles, cracks and frost create patterns that look like cells or galaxies. Each picture shows an area only a few centimetres to a metre across.
Matt Horspool's aerial photograph looks straight down on a marina pier with rows of moored boats, while a single boat cuts a wake across dark green water. The top-down view, popular with drone photographers, turns a harbour into a clean geometric design.
Xavier Portela photographs cities at night from helicopters and edits them in vivid pinks and blues. This aerial view of Midtown Manhattan around Times Square shows the dense grid lit up like a circuit board, part of a long-running series of neon-toned city portraits.
Macro photo of a butterfly wing. Photo: Chris Perani (Website | Instagram)
A macro photograph by Chris Perani reveals the scales on a butterfly wing, overlapping like tiles on a roof. Each scale is a single flattened cell, and wing colours come both from pigments and from microscopic structures that reflect light.
People, dance and everyday stories
Puerto Rican photographer Omar Z. Robles is known for photographing dancers mid-movement in city streets and on rooftops. Here a nude male dancer balances on one foot beside a weathered water tank against a clear sky, turning the human body into a study of line and tension. Robles works with professional dancers, and the pose is held for a split second rather than staged with props.
“Indiana Woodward, Soloist, New York City Ballet. Dress by Leanne Marshall.” Photo: NYC Dance Project (Website | Facebook | Instagram)
NYC Dance Project, the photographers Ken Browar and Deborah Ory, photographed Indiana Woodward of New York City Ballet leaping in a red dress by Leanne Marshall. Their studio portraits of dancers, published in the book The Art of Movement, use plain backdrops so that fabric and form carry the image.
“Yumeji and her friend Chinatsu.” Photo: Shin Noguchi (Website | Instagram)
Japanese street photographer Shin Noguchi often photographs his own family. This frame shows his daughter Yumeji with her friend Chinatsu at a restaurant table, one gently touching the other's face. Noguchi's work is valued for capturing unposed affection, the kind of moment that lasts less than a second and is easy to miss.
Eduardo Asenjo Matus (Website | Facebook | Instagram | Flickr)
Photographer Eduardo Asenjo Matus uses slow shutter speeds in black and white, so the crowd and traffic dissolve into streaks while one young woman stays sharp. The technique isolates a single face in a busy street and suggests how a person can feel alone among moving strangers.
Packer Family Photography (Facebook)
A sleeping newborn lies in the centre of a heart made from the syringes and needles her mother used during IVF treatment. The image, by Packer Family Photography, went viral in 2018 as a portrait of what many parents go through before a baby arrives. Families who share such pictures often say they want to make the long, private work of fertility treatment visible.
Noah Berger
A vehicle burns in a gutted landscape in this image by Noah Berger, a California photographer who covered the state's wildfires for the Associated Press. 2018 brought the deadliest and most destructive fire season in California's recorded history, including the Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise in November.
Francois Dourlen (Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | 500px)
French photographer François Dourlen holds his phone up to real scenes so that cartoon and film characters on the screen blend into the world behind them. In this frame Marge Simpson's tall blue hair lines up with spikes of blue delphiniums. The series is a playful example of how smartphones changed creative photography.
Ash Gallery, a photography gallery in Tanzania, shared this image of a fisherman casting a net into shallow turquoise water. Cast-net fishing from the shore remains an everyday livelihood along the East African coast. The open net, caught mid-flight, gives the picture its shape.
The Dutch travel bloggers behind Salt in Our Hair photographed themselves on the white, wave-shaped terraces of Hsinbyume Pagoda in Mingun, Myanmar. Built in 1816, the pagoda's seven terraces represent the mountain ranges around Mount Meru in Buddhist cosmology. Travel photography like this shaped how many people pictured destinations in 2018.
Israeli photographer Oded Wagenstein documents remote communities and older people. Here a woman in a patterned headscarf stands among a dense herd of reindeer, apparently in the Russian Arctic, where herding families still follow their animals between seasonal pastures.
What 2018's photographs tell us
Looking across these pictures, a few threads stand out. Wildlife photography moved toward intimate, story-driven images, like a gorilla clinging to its caretaker or a fox refusing to give up its meal. Drones and helicopters made the overhead view ordinary, and photographers responded by looking for pattern and colour rather than simply height. Night photography kept improving as cameras handled high sensitivity better, which is why star trails and the Milky Way appear so often.
The year also showed how fast a single image can travel. A proposal at Taft Point and an eagle over San Juan Island reached millions of people within days, and that reach often came without proper credit. If you share any of these photographs, link back to the photographer. It is the simplest way to support the people who spent hours, sometimes years, waiting for one frame.
Sources: Photographers' own pages as linked in each credit; Sony World Photography Awards.
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