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These are my favorites among the thousands of photos I took in the past year in the Northeast, Hawaii, Florida, and Quebec. To make the cut, the subject of the photo had to be significant for me, and the photo had to be nicely composed and lit. All photos are copyright © 2025 Dianne L. Durante. To see favorite photos from previous years, click here.

Quebec City

Parliament at night, from the 19th floor of the Hilton.

Street in the lower part of Quebec City – a great place for strolling.

Everybody’s favorite photo spot in Quebec City: the Chateau de Frontenac. The St. Lawrence River is off the cliff on the right.

Northeastern US

From a lovely exhibition of Edison-Mazda advertising (early 20th century) at the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts: Dean Cornwell’s Lighting the First Incandescent Lamp, Edison’s Laboratory, Menlo Park, New Jersey, painted in 1940.

A great memory, although not a great photo: ATP tennis tournament at Newport, Rhode Island, on a grass court. This is as close as I’ll ever get to Wimbledon!

A splendid sunrise: August in the Adirondack Mountains, western New York.

New Hampshire: view from the top of Mount Washington. The cog railway that has climbed the mountain since 1869 is inching its way along at the right. We were lucky to visit on a (mostly) clear day.

New York City: the Louis Vuitton headquarters under renovation, on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue & 57th Street. This was taken in July. I don’t know if the building is still under lock and key (as it were) in January 2026.

New York City: “needle buildings” from Columbus Circle.

Hawaii

I’d never been to Hawaii before this year. There’s a lot of pretty scenery. Given the travel time from the East coast and the cost of food on the islands, I probably won’t make a point of returning. And yet, there’s no denying it’s a beautiful place.

Memorial to a sailor at Pearl Harbor.

Statue of King Kamehameha I in front of the Supreme Court building. In the reboot of Hawaii Five-0, this is Five-0’s HQ.

Lava tube. Cool (i.e., not filled with hot lava!) but also a wee bit creepy.

Manta rays swooping in to feed. This one’s my husband’s photo: I’m a non-scuba-diving spouse, a.k.a. “bubblehead”. (Sounds amusingly ditzy.)

From the top of Mauna Kea (on the Big Island): the mountain’s shadow just before sunset.

Observatories on Mauna Kea, above the clouds. When we left the coast, it was in the 80s; a few hours later, after sunset, it was in the 30s at the top of Mauna Kea.

After sunset: looking south toward Kilauea, which was erupting, or at least burping. The stars, the volcano, and the irregular line of hills in the foreground: this is my favorite pic of Hawaii, from my favorite tour.

The food in Hawaii was expensive and not that good, but this dessert at Nui, an Italian restaurant in the Hilton complex on the Big Island, sticks in my mind. It’s biancomangiare, is a thick custard made with almond milk, scattered with pistachios, orange, mint, and merengue dots.

Alas, I did not see any men working this way.

This is the type of photo people who have vacationed in Hawaii like to frame. It’s gorgeous, but I live in Florida, and I can see this sort of thing (more or less) if I drive to the Gulf Coast.

Florida

From the museum at the Naval Air Base, Pensacola, a WW2 Corsair. Of all the things I could marvel at re a couple tons of metal that can zoom through the air, here’s the one I choose: they can FOLD UP THE WINGS on this plane so that more planes will fit on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. (The docents at this museum are fantastic. I’d happily go back.)

Dunedin, Gulf Coast: a street lamp decorated for the holidays, in front of a Mexican restaurant.

From a Maxfield Parrish exhibition at West Palm Beach: one of my favorite Parrish illustrations, for Italian Villas and Their Gardens.

Street art in Safety Harbor, on Old Tampa Bay: a work in progress from Chalkfest. The art at events such as this is almost always representational, and technically good.

More

These days, most of my work appears on my Substack. For a list of my Substack posts by topic, see here.