Wildlife Photographer Shares His ‘Worst’ Photos of 2024

by · Peta Pixel
An almost camouflaged groundhog and a fisherman made Paul Danese’s “worst photos” of the year.

Photographers often use this time of year to reflect on their work and maybe share some of the best shots they’ve taken in the past 12 months. But one wildlife photographer has taken the unusual step of sharing his “worst” photos of 2024.

Paul Danese took to Reddit to share the blurry, badly composed, out-of-focus photos he took in 2024. Titled “Everyone’s trotting out their best of 2024. Well, here’s (arguably) my WORST of 2024,” Danese explains to PetaPixel his post was “funny and unexpected”, which is precisely what he was going for.

“A lot of people post their ‘best of’ around this time of year. I look at their stuff and think, ‘Well … I can’t compete on quality. But I can compete on humor’,” he says. “So I posted my worst of the year.”

A snow goose from 10 miles away.
So close to nailing this shot of a black-and-white warbler.
There is a white-tailed deer in there somewhere.
You can put this one down to poor light.

Danese’s photos include animals that are obscured by foliage, flat images, and background distractions. “I’d say it’s bad light, lack of detail, cluttered scenery, lack of preparedness, etc,” he says when asked what makes for a bad photo.

This one is plain bad luck with the distracting van in the background.
This chestnut-sided warbler was just obscured by a leaf.
This barred owl was also hidden by foliage.

All Photographers Take Bad Images

The world’s greatest photographers have all taken sub-par pictures that they didn’t show the world. It can come down to poor lighting, bad timing, or any number of factors. Redditors were appreciative of Danese’s honesty.

“Sometimes people forget that photographers aren’t perfect all the time and indeed get crappy pictures,” writes one commenter.

“I love this post!” writes another. “It shows that a good portion of all photographer’s photos are trash. The amazing photos have a lot of effort and/or luck put into them.”

Many Redditors quite-liked this groundhog photo.
It looks like this northern harrier was just a little too far away.
This photos works but just not as a wildlife picture.
This porcupine managed to avoid being seen.

For his part, Danese says it is important to embrace bad pictures. “Pretty much every discipline involves failure and learning from failure,” he says. “That’s a pretty banal comment, but it’s still true.”

Danese is actually a very good photographer exemplified by this image of a singing common yellowthroat.

Danese says he lives near Hartford, Connecticut, and mainly takes photos to “get my steps in”. Although he decided to share his bad photos, Danese is in fact an excellent photographer and contributes his work to Wikipedia which you can see here.

Image credits: Photographs by Paul Danese