2022 – A Year of Travel In 100 Color Photographs

Every year I post 100 of my favorite photos from the year’s travels. As part of my photo-editing process, I edit my photos chronologically. This means that the more travel or photo-intensive my trips are, the longer it tends to take me to close out a year.

2022 was a lovely year of travels and included visits to the American Southwest, Austria, Italy, Norway, Vietnam, Sweden and Denmark. It also included an incredible honor and exciting award as I was recognized as one of 9 Honorable Mentions in the 2022 National Geographic ‘Pictures of the Year’ photo contest. This was an incredible honor and featured across the internet from Good Morning America to PEOPLE and CNBC. As someone who has been deeply inspired by National Geographic from an early age, you can imagine just how meaningful this was!

This post is part of an annual tradition.  For previous years, check out 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. You can also see my 100 favorite black and white shots from 2021 (HERE). My top 100 shots in black and white from 2022 will come soon.

For my daily photo posts feel free to tune in and follow along via Instagram @virtualwayfarer.

Questions about how I composed or took a specific photo? Feel free to ask in a comment. You’re also encouraged to check out my complete flickr albums here which include the many other shots from 2022 (and previous years) which didn’t make it in this post. As you can imagine, picking “just” 100 photos for this is actually quite difficult!

As is true of my style more broadly, virtually every photo in this list is a single shot. I don’t do bracketing, blending, replacement or focus stacking. Nothing has been added/removed outside of correcting lens spots. Generally my edits focus on adjusting sharpness, contrast, dodging and burning, and some mild saturation and color enhancement to bring the photos closer to what I saw in the moment.

Thanks for joining me on this exploration of my favorite color photos from 2022. For these photos I used a Sony A7R III camera with a mixture of lenses. These included a Sigma 100-400, a Sony 24-70 F4, and a Tamron 17-28M.