I tend to trust local knowledge. It’s kept me alive many times. So last August, when I found myself in an interfaith prayer service for peace at the Israel-Gaza border, our prayers underscored by the heavy thud of U.S.-provided bombs being dropped just across the border on Palestinians, I deferred to local knowledge when our prayers were suddenly interrupted by an air raid siren. The Israelis among us quickly ordered us to lie on the ground with our hands over our heads. I shot a few pix of the process and then heard another voice from somewhere–sounding a lot like my wife–also telling me to get down. So I did. But after a few seconds, my camera, which at times has a mind of its own, kept pulling me up. I was struggling to pull the camera down when the guy on the ground beside me gave me the eye. He’s Rabbi Avi Dabush, a leader of Rabbis for Human Rights and a survivor of the 2023 Hamas attack on the nearby Kibbutz Nirim. He doesn’t fool around, so while he’s not exactly yelling at me to get down (he’s pretty soft-spoken), his one-eyed appraisal clearly implied that I was something less than a genius. So I deferred to rabbinical tradition and assumed the position. After a while, the all clear signal sounded.

2024 was another year of slowly transitioning to something resembling retirement. I took a few assignments, but also worked on some projects on my bucket list. Take bears, for example. In September, Lyda and I wandered north into British Columbia and the very southern tip of Alaska. One highlight of that journey was meeting some grizzly bears feasting on migrating salmon near Hyder, Alaska.

We did that journey in our aging VW camper van, which permitted some rather scenic places to sleep, but also broke down along the way. Such malfunction is part of most any journey in a 37-year old van (or a 72-year-old body). Breakdowns notwithstanding, we relished the time to ourselves in the wilderness.

Earlier in the year, I traveled to North Carolina to document the gathering of hundreds of United Methodists at their (usually) quadrennial General Conference. A lot of that was the rather mundane work of taking pictures of people talking into microphones, but the meeting also finally put an end to five decades of denominational discrimination against LGBTQI folks, a development that was celebrated by many.

The changes weren’t celebrated by everyone, of course. The votes in Charlotte hastened the departure of a vocal minority of conservative Methodists for a new denomination defined principally by what it is against: gays, women, and inclusive theology.

But I’ve been covering these meetings for decades, and there was a spirit of calm to this one that I’d never witnessed in past conferences, which commonly included demonstrations and even arrests. Turns out that doing the right thing, even belatedly, helps us feel good.

To be honest, such large meetings can be rather boring visually, so I was always looking for a different angle to tell the story.

One aspect of these conferences I have always relished is observing the sign language interpreters. Single images never seem to capture the magic sufficiently, so combining multiple exposures in one picture works well.

Sign language mavins are so cool that when interpreters Andrea Raye and Tina McDaniel groove to “Stand by Me,” they sign the lyrics.

We had another eclipse this past year, though just a partial one, which I grabbed through a rare break in the clouds. That’s not dirt in the middle of my lens. It’s a sunspot.

For the second time I journeyed to the mountains of New Mexico to document life at United World College.

I captured classroom life, even when the classroom was outside, along with drama class, mountain biking, and students tutoring chess at a local elementary school.

I also defied gravity one more time. (Photo by Carl-Martin Nelson.)

During a visit to the Philippines, I again documented what’s happening with victims of the so-called “War on Drugs” that killed thousands during the Duterte regime and has continued into the rule of Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. In this picture, Mely Fernandez holds faded photos of her son Wesley and her husband Andres, who were assassinated in 2016 in Bagong Silang. Two masked men entered the family home and shot the two in front of Fernandez. Since the killings, Fernandez has become an active member of Rise Up for Life and Rights, which unites family and friends of victims in demanding an end to the violence along with punishment for those responsible. The group was formed by United Methodist Deaconesses Norma Dollaga and Rubylin Litao.

Here are Dollaga and Litao praying with Fernandez and two other survivors of the spree of extrajudicial killings. They have been instrumental in taking the murders to the International Criminal Court, which they hope will issue indictments in 2025.

I also used the visit to document the work of Sister Marvie Misolas (left), a Maryknoll Sister who does some creative work in defending the environment in a country that has proved extremely vulnerable to the climate crisis.

While in the Philippines I also visited the family of a Filipina domestic worker who I had interviewed while working on a story about migrant workers in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong, of course, is always a fascinating place to visit.

I worked on a variety of stories there, from a school founded by Maryknoll Sisters . . .

. . . to the daily work of migrant domestic workers . . .

. . . including those staying in a church-supported shelter after escaping abusive work environments . . .

. . . and of course I was on the streets on Sunday, their one day off, when they relax with their friends.

For a church ministry to migrants, there’s no better place than the street to provide workers with health checks and education about their rights.

I also spent some time this year in Taiwan, where Maryknoll has a variety of ministries with migrant workers. These include a presence with fisherfolk and seafarers . . .

. . . as well as accompanying migrants who’ve been abused and need shelter.

I was warmly welcomed back by the Maryknoll community in Taiwan, where I’d visited two years ago. This time I also focused on how they’re training new priests and young men considering the priesthood.

I was honored to worship and pray with the community, always impressed with the deep faith of the migrants.

And I got to celebrate Halloween with the children of migrant families.

I’ll be writing about the creative work that Charles Niece is doing there for Maryknoll with supply chain dynamics, helping workers convince giant corporations to do the right thing.

That’s often a difficult struggle. Yet victories are won, as with these Filipino migrants. After years of abuse and forced unpaid overtime at a factory, they got help from the church to stand up for their rights and won a sizeable judgment against company managers.

Over the course of the year, my photos were used in a variety of different ways. In December, the new leaders of the World Methodist Council presented Pope Francis with an image of mine from South Sudan. It’s a group of women who were displaced by war for years, but had recently come back home and were returning from working in their reclaimed fields. In this image captured by a Vatican photographer, the WMC’s general secretary, the Rev. Reynaldo Ferreira Leão Neto, presents the image to Francis. The gift occasioned a conversation with the pope about the churches’ shared commitment to immigrants and the particular situation in South Sudan, both topics that have long been important to Francis.

Here’s the image the World Methodist Council gave to Francis.

For the record, Francis has seen my images before in several settings. For example, in 2017 my photos were exhibited in St. Peter’s Basilica during a special prayer service for war-torn countries in Africa.

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As resistance to U.S. support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza surged during the year, I was able to document protests in several places, including my home town of Eugene.

At one point, students Salem Khoury (left), a Palestinian, and Gabriela Moreno, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, led a demonstration through the University of Oregon campus.

People across the country spoke out this year against the war on Gaza. Here are images I captured in Eureka, California; Langley, Washington; and Charlotte, North Carolina. (Yes, that’s Kristin Stoneking in the Charlotte photo. She became a bishop a short time later.)

As I noted at the beginning of this post, I also had the opportunity to document a prayer vigil on the Israel-Gaza border during August.

It was a strange time to be in the Holy Land. Most airlines had stopped their flights to Israel, so I had to travel through neighboring Jordan, where I joined up with a delegation of U.S. Christians working for a ceasefire in Gaza. Because we weren’t allowed into Gaza (Israel wants to control the narrative so doesn’t permit journalists, for example, to enter Gaza), we spent several days visiting with people in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. (We also visited with anti-war Israelis and relatives of the Israeli hostages being held in Gaza.) Here we’re praying with Setrag Balian, a leader of the youth-led struggle to save the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, which is under threat from developers and those who want to do away with the city’s religious diversity.

We visited the Israeli prison in Ofer, on the occupied West Bank, where Israeli security forces have imprisoned Palestinian children. Here is Scott Wright, a member of Pax Christi USA, praying with other delegation members outside a building where we could hear the mothers of the children as they waited, often in vain, to see their children.

We visited several Palestinian communities under pressure from the Israeli military and settlers, including a small group of Bedouin sheep farmers in Umm Jamal, a small West Bank village near Nablus. Here’s one of them weeping as they were forced to pack up their belongings and move, chased off their home of the last 30 years by government-backed settlers. We were told to leave by Israeli soldiers, but politely refused. We witnessed the settlers from afar, but they refused to approach as long as our delegation was there. We only left in the evening when Israeli accompaniers promised to remain with the Beduin for the night.

We visited with people in the Balata Refugee Camp in Nablus, which was attacked by the IDF a few hours later, with several residents killed.

We listened to a wide variety of voices, including Alice Kisiya, a Palestinian Christian who has led the resistance to the steady eviction of families from the Al-Makhrour area near Bethlehem; Iyad Burnat, a Palestinian activist who leads the non-violent struggle of the people of Bil’in, a besieged village in the West Bank; Sahar Vardi, an Israeli anti-militarist activist and one of the founders of Hamushim, a project challenging Israel’s military industry and arms trade; and Daher Nassar, whose family runs a farm near Bethlehem that has become the Tent of Nations, a church-supported educational and environmental center that sits on the last remaining Palestinian hilltop in the middle of the Gush Etzion settlement block near Bethlehem.

We visited Silwan, a neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem. The eyes on the houses are part of an international public art project in support of Silwan’s longstanding fight against dispossession by Israeli officials. Murals depicting the eyes of local and international leaders, activists, workers, and more, are scattered across the hills of Silwan and can be seen from miles away. Eighty percent of the homes in Silwan and other neighborhoods in East Jerusalem have received eviction notices, and thousands of Palestinians have already been dispossessed. Among them is Fakhri Abu Diab, with whom we shared a meal in the rubble of his home, which was demolished in February.

We visited Rahat, a city in southern Israel, to help hundreds of Palestinian citizens of Israel pack food for people in Gaza. The collection of food in the largely Bedouin community was organized by Standing Together, a progressive grassroots movement mobilizing Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel against the occupation. Unfortunately, the Israeli military, which uses starvation as a weapon, has regularly blocked such shipments, so I don’t know if our boxes of pasta, canned beans, and flour ever made it into Gaza.

I wrote several articles from the trip, including one on the work of the Rev. Jane Eesley, a United Methodist missionary in the Holy Land. Here she accompanies Ramzi Qubrosi as he delivers food to a home in Beit Sahour, a town in the occupied West Bank near Bethlehem. The food delivery provides nutrition and human contact to people adversely affected by the decline in tourism that has ravaged Bethlehem’s economy since the 2023 Hamas attack and the subsequent war in Gaza. It’s sponsored by the Shepherd Society, the outreach arm of the Bethlehem Bible College, with support from the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR).

Throughout our delegation’s visit to the Holy Land, we strived to listen. It’s a place usually overflowing with tourists and pilgrims, but with regional tensions at a high, the streets and holy places were almost empty. In that relative quiet, we listened for the voices of the “living stones,” the real women, men, and children who live in the land where Jesus walked, and who labor constantly for an end to occupation and repression. As they light candles and pray, may we come to understand how our actions–and taxes–contribute to violence, and may we find the courage to contribute from afar to making both Palestine and Israel places where ordinary people can live in peace and unafraid.

Closer to home, I saved money on psychotherapy by using my camera gear to explore the natural world close by, including a Red-shouldered hawk eating snakes in my back yard.

All year long we enjoyed life in our back yard in Oregon, including a yarrow leaf entombed by an ice storm, a syrphid fly supping on pollen, and a Downey woodpecker excavating a nest outside my kitchen window.

We also delighted in observing a beetle, probably Cychrus tuberculatus (I posed it on a mirror); a Cedar waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum) tossing an Osoberry in its mouth; a Golden-crowned sparrow munching flower petals; a Leaf hopper assassin bug (Zelus renardii) waiting for its prey; and a Merodon equestris–a kind of hoverfly–up to its many eyeballs in pollen on a Pacific ninebark flower.

In my Big Backyard, the Pacific Northwest, I also captured images of natural beauty, including feuding Bald eagles on the Fraser River, a Red-tailed hawk on the Skagit River, a Black oystercatcher–known for his practical jokes–preparing to land on an unsuspecting friend on the Oregon coast, a Sharp-shinned hawk in Coos Bay, a gull contemplating the flight paths of other birds from its perch at Coquille Point, a Canada goose cooling off on the Willamette River, and a trillium blooming deep in a Cascades forest.

The most common subject of my photography this year was likely my grandson Logan, known throughout social media as The Little Guy. My wife and I care for him a significant portion of the time.

The highpoint of his year was no doubt when he was kidnapped by zombies and taken to the Planet Fomalhaut to feed to the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, widely known as the Zombie Fungus. But The Little Guy made his escape through a rip in the Time-Matter Continuum and plummeted rapidly back to Earth.

Once back among us, he took refuge in his Zombie Shelter, where he remains invisible to reanimated malefactors of all stripes. (If you can see him, you’re not a zombie.)

Life for The Little Guy is an adventure, especially as he’s been training for several months to be the next James Bond, a challenge that necessitates specialized training in concealment, high-speed driving, and fast roping from aircraft.

He’s also working on being patient, whether to count to ten without cheating while playing hide and seek, or to wait until we get somewhere while hiking. It helps if the end of the hike is a scenic swing over the Willamette Valley.

Like most 2-year-olds, he has a hard time waiting for the dentist to get to work and would rather just do it himself.

He enjoys spending time with his extended family, including his great grandmother Barbara (who he knows as Toby), his Uncle Lucas (here holding him during an eye exam), and his cousin Natalia (helping the budding James Bond practice karate).

But Nana is near the top of the chart of favorite relatives, whether she’s taking him to the park, teaching him chess, helping him participate in Olympics skateboarding, or providing a kid-friendly equestrian experience.

Nana is also a pretty special nap partner.

The Little Guy is fascinated by trash trucks, and will wait in the driveway to watch them do their work. And before putting out the recycling bin, he’ll often police its contents, making sure we haven’t tried to practice aspirational recycling.

The Little Guy misses me when I’m gone, and after one trip this year was waiting at the airport when I arrived home. To make sure I didn’t venture off again too soon, he obtained a leash which he connected to my wrist, thus keeping me from wandering into traffic or otherwise bumbling into harm’s way. Such empathy for his elders’ wellbeing marks true character in this young man. I’m looking forward to what another year brings in his life.