Michele Doying | The VergeThe Verge is about technology and how it makes us feel. Founded in 2011, we offer our audience everything from breaking news to reviews to award-winning features and investigations, on our site, in video, and in podcasts.2025-10-17T17:35:49+00:00https://www.theverge.com/authors/michele-doying/rsshttps://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/verge-rss-large_80b47e.png?w=150&h=150&crop=1Amelia Holowaty KralesMichele DoyingVjeran Pavic<![CDATA[2019: A year in photographs on The Verge]]>https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/28/21024791/2019-the-verge-photography-best-of-a-year-in-pictures-photos-original2025-01-23T19:52:31-05:002019-12-28T10:00:00-05:00
The Verge photo team took thousands of photographs in 2019 — from a rocket launch in Florida and cloud chasing in Córdoba, Argentina, to the Pixel 4 and science stop-motion videos. We talked with content moderators, climate activists, authors, presidential candidates, and influencers, and got them all on camera.
We aimed to keep the selection small this year, since there’s so much else on Instagram and the site itself. For this piece, we only picked images that meant something to us, whether because the photo captured a moment in a powerful story, showcased the skill and creativeness of our team, or it was just a great photograph.
When Microsoft’s HoloLens was initially released in 2016, it held enormous promise. Three years later, the mixed reality headset got a significant upgrade which makes me trust in this technology just a little bit more.
When Marlon James stopped by the studio to shoot his portrait and stop-motion for What’s in your Bag, I bet he didn’t think we’d be throwing around his pens. We didn’t either — until we found out how important these pens are for his work.
Ramsey Orta has been in prison since October 2016, after filming the killing of his friend Eric Garner by NYPD officers. Here, Orta poses for a portrait at the Groveland Correctional Facility visitation room in Sonyea, New York.
Getting this shot meant waking up at 4AM and spending about 12 hours on a fishing boat fighting motion sickness. Easily one of my favorite shoots at The Verge.
April
Art Club logo Stop Motion by Michele Doying / The Verge
Can you believe Art Club isn’t even a year old yet? It seems like it’s been here forever! We tossed out the idea of using cut-up magazine letters as a half-joke, half-serious idea — but it ended up capturing the spirit of the series perfectly. After spending hours flipping through magazines and cutting out various fonts, each member of Art Club was invited to put together their own arrangement.
During the photography, I discovered that I really liked the juxtaposition of a complete letter on one side and cut-up imagery on the back. And being a stop-motion lover, I went ahead and created a few arrangements. We ended up choosing this one, and I replaced the original magazine images with our own original Verge photography and artwork.
Max Gunawan created Lumio, a decorative lamp in the shape of a book that’s struggling with copycats. It made perfect sense to use his product as a main source of light for this portrait.
Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang sits for a portrait at his campaign office in New York City. The campaign was building out a new office when we visited, so we ended up shooting Yang in the unused space.
Usually the photo team doesn’t venture out into creating a lot of photo composites, but for Game Boy’s 25th anniversary, I wanted to do something more playful.
Dancer Susie Meoww uses one of Instagram’s in-house studios at the Los Angeles headquarters. Shooting the equipment in use this way, you get a sense of how much work goes into maintaining a star’s image.
Mexico’s drug war has left tens of thousands of casualties in secret graves. Now, the mothers of the missing are digging them up, armed with iron rods and quadcopter drones. We took portraits of three of those mothers, who are facing down real danger to find out the truth.
There’s nothing quite like standing next to a launching rocket. We tried to capture that physical feeling with this long exposure, which shows the exact moment the Falcon Heavy’s main engines shut off and the parabolic arc that follows.
We decided to throw a party for Foxconn’s first birthday, but since it wasn’t much of a celebration, we let the cake melt. Having the photo split up in strips and dissipate was just the icing on the cake.
This year, The Verge visited Facebook’s worst-performing content moderation site in North America — located in Tampa, Florida — and spoke to former employees about their experiences and the effects the job has had on their mental health. This portrait shows Shawn Speagle in his home; Speagle worked at Cognizant for about six months, where he mostly dealt with graphic violence and hate speech.
Chris Anderson moves through a Target’s clearance racks in search of items that would be profitable to sell on Amazon. That search is the essence of the story we were trying to tell about merchants traveling the backroads of America in search of rare soap and coveted toys, so we wanted a photo that did it justice.
Every time we do a gift guide, we try to fit in as many of the items in the lede image as we can — and then we convert that lede image into a GIF. And it’s a fun balance trying to keep the gift guides recognizable while also making sure they are each unique and can hold their own.
Back to school guide Top 8 Stop Motion by Michele Doying / The Verge
If I had to choose a favorite stop-motion from this year’s back to school guide, it would be this one. I loved the integration of the objects, the title of the breakout (Top 8), and the magic of it all working together. I think I could easily watch this for hours, especially the kettle pouring out the 8!
We spent a whole day with a 1960s Porsche that had been retrofitted with a Tesla electric motor, but my favorite photo came at the very end of the night.
Clouds hold the key to forecasting climate change, but they’re extremely difficult to understand, let alone measure. These photos captured a sensor site, various radar gear, and one of the storm chasers themselves. Put together, you feel both the scrappiness and the possibilities of the project.
I’ll be honest: getting this set of photos to look the way I wanted took longer than expected. But closing yourself in a studio for a few hours to play with mirrors and LED strips usually yields success.
There was so much happening during this Extinction Rebellion protest that it was hard to get a clear shot — but the crowded composition drives home the energy we felt at the event.
For a lot of people, this smartphone was a big disappointment, but the orange design makes it a perfect gadget to photograph (and also take photos with, but read our review for more on that).
Gabriel Frey harvests ash trees from the Maine forest as part of a broader fight against invasive insects. The more I learned about his work, the more I wanted to know about the physical craft of it — and his workshop was the first place I wanted to see.
When the US entered Afghanistan, local DJs were hired to help with the war effort, only to be abandoned when the American military pulled out. This was the most humane piece in our Pirate Radio series, and had some of the most striking portrait photography we did all year.
This half-built installation at Color Factory’s newest location in Houston, Texas tells the whole story in one image. It’s dazzling upfront — but doesn’t look quite as magical from behind the scenes.
Despite the bad reviews for this ARM-based laptop, it was still one of the best pieces of hardware I photographed this year. And it was hard to pick my favorite photo, but I eventually picked the one we used for the thumbnail where the unfolded Surface Pro X forms an “X” silhouette.
This almost forgotten wearable from Snap actually looks more like a fashion accessory than a gadget, so a stylized product photo shoot felt like the perfect approach.
We made eight gift guides this year, but the Holiday Gift Guide was by far the biggest and most collaborative. The amazing results are the product of hard work from Amelia Holowaty Krales’ photography, Michele Doying’s stop-motion, and Michael Moore’s organizational skills.
The third installment of The Verge’s content moderators series looked at former Google employee Daisy Soderberg-Rivkin, showing that even directly employed moderators can face harrowing conditions.
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James BarehamAmelia Holowaty KralesMichele Doying<![CDATA[2018: A year in photographs on The Verge]]>https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/28/18146883/2018-the-verge-photography-a-year-in-pictures2025-10-17T13:35:49-04:002018-12-28T15:00:08-05:00
Last year, the introduction to 2017: A Year in Photographs began, “As 2017 finally draws to a close, we can all look back on a year that in many ways seems to have lasted 10.” If that statement was true of 2017, then it is doubly true of 2018. There has been so much news and information hitting us from all sides over this past year that, at times, it has seemed almost overwhelming. So much has occurred, it is hard to remember exactly what happened when.
Looking back over this past year, we were struck by how many photo shoots we thought we’d shot back in 2017 — and how many we’d completely forgotten about. We all remembered the big tent pole reviews like the iPhone XS, iPhone XR, or Pixel 3, but had no recollection of the portraits of Dessa or Mr. Lui’s building full of old CRT screens. Remember the Apple HomePod? That was shot in January 2018, but it feels like a lifetime ago.
2018 was the year we consolidated our creative approach to our tech reviews, our gift guides, and our various series. We worked hard on pushing ourselves creatively and refining our style, but we also made sure we were as consistent as possible. We shot many of our camera reviews on the same black background and used an identical layout for all of the lead images for our two gift guides — only the products and background colors changed. We also developed a tight shot list for our series “What’s in Your Bag.”
But striving for consistency didn’t stop us from being experimental. For example, Amelia Holowaty Krales used very creative lighting for her portraits of the artist Serpentwithfeet; Michele Doying spent hours cutting ones and zeros out of paper for her Facebook stop-motion animations; and Vlad Savov ditched his camera altogether and shot all his photos at the Geneva Motor Show on his Pixel 2XL.
We have selected the following photographs, not necessarily because we think they are the best of the past year’s bunch, but because they mean something to us personally. There are many more photos of gadgets and weird tech that didn’t make the cut, but we had to draw the line somewhere. And remember, if we missed an image that you particularly like, it is not necessarily because we didn’t think it was good enough — we may simply have forgotten that we took it! So please feel free to remind us. And once you’re finished here, please check out our review of the best illustrations that have appeared on The Verge in 2018.
The photographs below are arranged chronologically by the date they were first published. —James Bareham
It was really interesting to visit Danny Rozin’s studio and see his process. I have been following his work for a while, and The Verge has covered some of his mirrors in the past. It was exciting to see his new work, the biggest to date. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
APPLE AIRPODS
Every once in a while I’m able to schedule a “studio play day” to experiment with different concepts and gadgets without the pressure of having to get the work up on the site. On this day, I had spent most of my morning commute watching slow-motion videos of splashes, so I knew what shapes to cut the paper into in order to make them look as real as possible. In the studio, I wasn’t sure how the final animation would turn out, but watching the images come alive once I put the them together was the perfect way to start the year. —Michele Doying
In February 2018, the Circuit Breaker live show moved from Twitter to YouTube. Over the course of the 11-episode season, the core team of (left to right) Dami Lee, Nilay Patel, Ashley Carman, Chaim Gartenberg, Paul Miller, and Jake Kastrenakes covered an eclectic range of weird and wonderful gadgets, and were regularly joined by special guests — including many members of The Verge staff. Paul Miller also developed a knack for making strangely surreal special reports that aired during the course of each show. The final episode of Circuit Breaker Live streamed on April 17th, 2018. —James Bareham
Chi-Tien Lui has owned his building in the New York City neighborhood of Tribeca — where property values are some of the highest on the planet — since the 1990s. Almost every room (at least every room I saw) seemed to be filled to the ceiling with CRT screens and vintage video components. The rows upon rows of video monitors, screens, circuit boards and switches are the raw ingredients Mr. Lui uses to repair the aging CRTs still being used in video walls and installations by his clients, which include the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney. There are few people left like Chi-Tien Lui, who have both years of experience working with CRTs and access to the spare parts. It is clear that CRTs are not just his business, they’re his passion, which is probably why he’s so good at fixing them. —James Bareham
The Google Clips camera was specifically designed with parents and parents of pets in mind. As I am the proud owner of Monty (left) and Georgie, two long-haired English cream dachshunds, our Clips review seemed an ideal opportunity to get them both back on camera for The Verge (their previous modeling assignment was for our Furbo video back in May of 2016). I hope Dan Seifert will take no offense at my opinion that they were the true stars of the Clips video. —James Bareham
The video team and I traveled to Nilay Patel’s house — which is chock-full of speakers and vintage audio equipment — to film our review of Apple’s HomePod. The HomePod is very Apple, by which I mean that it is beautifully made and works really well, but only if you are fully immersed in Apple’s ecosystem (which I am not). It sounds amazing, although I personally am never going to buy it. But the shortcomings of the HomePod aside, the winter light streaming into Nilay’s house made this one of the most beautiful product shoots of 2018. —James Bareham
For this shoot, Amelia Holowaty Krales used the pocket-sized Nebula Capsule to project images onto Paul Miller. The result were some seriously surreal portraits. —James Bareham
Box cutters (I am not a fan of X-Acto knives) were my go-to tool for carving these Mandarin characters out of paper. Although I printed a variety of sizes, due to time restraints I was only able to cut out the biggest set. Not wanting to make the growth of the characters a digital effect, I cut the smaller character sets into rectangles and removed the white paper in photoshop. After the shoot, The Verge’s design director William Joel used Adobe After Effects to apply a gray cast to the hands in order to give them a more sinister feel. I find it fascinating that we were able to use digital tools to maintain the integrity of the cutouts, while also enhancing them to bring this piece to the next level. —Michele Doying
The Model 3 is widely regarded as Tesla’s make-or-break model. To say that a lot is riding on this car is probably one of the greatest understatements of 2018. We got to drive one around the streets of downtown Manhattan for a few hours, where it certainly attracted a lot of attention from passersby. I personally found the Model 3 a bit of a letdown, especially when compared to Tesla’s Model S. The Model 3 seemed a little austere and basic in comparison, especially as the particular car we tested came with a number of additional options that drove the price well over $50K. —James Bareham
This shoot with the musician Dessa was one of my most experimental of the year. I photographed her in The Verge’s studio with a colorful lighting setup, and then used Photoshop to combine the portraits with a scan of her brain. —James Bareham
Ashley Carman and I were searching for a location to shoot pictures of her latest phone case — this particular model was by Marc Jacobs and covered in black suction cups. We met in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Dumbo and happened to walk by illustrator Yuko Shimizu’s double murals from 2013, which depict long octopus tentacles spelling out “yes.” It was a perfect spot. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
I recently found my first iPod, the first-generation 5GB model with the moveable click wheel. After much trial and error, I finally managed to recharge it, and found a rather bizarre collection of music from 2002 as a result. Though some of my music choices were rather dubious and very dated, I found the actual experience of clicking through the tracks and playlists to be as fresh in 2018 as it was when I first used the iPod 16 years ago. Great design truly doesn’t age. —James Bareham
When Arkansas implemented an algorithm to calculate the hours allotted to residents requiring home health care aid, Tammy Dobbs was among those whose hours were cut — in her case significantly. Verge senior reporter Colin Lecher and I went to Arkansas to interview and photograph Arkansas Legal Aid attorney Kevin De Liban and a few of the families affected by the new algorithm. This was definitely one of the most important stories I photographed in 2018. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
This year’s Geneva Motor Show was a big and, dare I say it, bold experiment for me. It’s the first professional assignment I’ve gone to without a dedicated camera of some sort — just myself and Google’s Pixel 2 XL. Admittedly, it wasn’t a huge risk to take when I knew my subjects would be innately photogenic cars sitting atop perfectly lit rotating platforms. But the adventure certainly demonstrated the incredible capability of modern mobile photography. —Vlad Savov
No offense to my colleagues, but I love Benicio Quinones’ tech reviews the best. I worked very closely with Tamara Warren, Benicio’s mom and The Verge‘s former transportation editor, but I particularly enjoyed shooting pictures for her son’s posts. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
I photographed Brad Kim, editor-in-chief of Know Your Meme, in the company’s Brooklyn offices. The photos were taken to accompany Kaitlyn Tiffany’s profile of the organization on its 10th anniversary (Kaitlin is a former Verge staffer who is now with The Goods). Toward the end of our visit, I followed Kim outside while he walked his dogs. The resulting environmental portrait became one of my favorites from the entire shoot. It didn’t make it into the finished piece, so it’s nice to able to show it here. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
Michele Doying’s stop-motion animation, created to mark the one-year anniversary of the launch of the Nintendo Switch, is arguably one of the best she produced this year. It is such a simple concept and so well executed, I find myself watching it over and over. —James Bareham
I was already a fan of Morehshin Allahyari’s work when I contacted her to see if she’d be willing to be featured in our series Technographica. The timing was perfect — she was starting a new project. I was able to capture some of the stages of design and production, along with the final exhibition of Allahyari’s She Who Sees the Unknown series. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
Now this was a fun day! Mariya Abdulkaf, our social media guru, reached out to see if I could shoot a stop-motion around the Oregon Trail game. After playing the first part to brainstorm ideas, I decided to create a tableau of scenes on a paper background while the screen showed our progress on the trail. Mariya helped me by cutting out the paper trees and water, while I focused my efforts on finishing the game as quickly as possible. I am glad my team refused to die until after encountering Chimney Rock, a mountain range, and a lightning storm (my favorite part). Those moments were all unexpected and required a lot of additional cutout work that left the photo studio floor strewn with paper scraps. But all these elements undoubtedly enhanced the final stop-motion. For those of you who are wondering how our determined team finally died in the game, they all expired in typical Oregon Trail fashion: measles, dysentery, and, in the case of Gunther, our fearless wagon leader, a fever. —Michele Doying
Car grilles and lots of them! The New York International Auto show was host to cars of all shapes and sizes, but I decided to focus on just the grilles for this photo essay. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
I joined writer Lizzie Plaugic and Verge video directors Alix Diaconis and Becca Farsace on a visit to the women behind Wearable Media at New Inc. The New Museum’s incubator space is located right next door to the museum on Bowery, a street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The atmospheric former factory space was undoubtedly one of my favorite locations to shoot during this past year. Lizzie is photographed here wearing Wearable Media’s celestial sensing jumpsuit, Ceres. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
I am going to come right out and say it: I love Nintendo Labo. It is one of my favorite pieces of tech from 2018 and is also one of the primary reasons I chose to buy a Switch. The fusion of folding cardboard and coding seems like such an odd idea until you actually start to play with it. Nintendo has made the process of building these cardboard games so seamless, straightforward, and fun it’s positively infectious. After all, how else are you going to play a meowing cat organ? And if you need further proof, watch Dami Lee use Labo to play “Rainbow Connection,” which also happens to be my favorite Verge video of 2018. —James Bareham
Facebook has rarely been out of the news this year, and most of that news has been very bad for the company. Casey Newton’s extensive coverage of Facebook on The Verge means that we need a lot of lead imagery made in advance, which is why Michele Doying created a number of stop-motion animations around the Facebook logo. This one is my personal favorite, not only because it’s so simple and effective, but because Michele put in so much work cutting out all of those paper ones and zeros by hand. —James Bareham
I think that this OLCP “$100 laptop” (widely referred to as the “green machine”) is the most futuristic yet old-fashioned-looking piece of tech I photographed this year. The green and white color scheme makes it look like it was built for Buzz Lightyear. —James Bareham
We shoot lots of photos of people wearing headphones every year. This shot of Verge reporter Shannon Liao wearing a pair of Anker Soundcore headphones was taken by Amelia Holowaty Krales in downtown New York City and has such a timeless quality to it that I think we’re going to be using this shot for years. —James Bareham
In 2018, we shot a lot of artists and creatives for our series “What’s in Your Bag,” and we have more planned for 2019. This shoot with The Knocks in their Chinatown studio in lower Manhattan was my first for the series. WIYB shoots are always fun, but most of the artists I photograph come to our studio. This shoot with The Knocks was especially interesting because this space meant so much to them — it was where much of their music has been recorded. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
GOOGLE ASSISTANT
2018 was arguably the year when voice assistants went truly mainstream. Michele Doying used colorful Play-Doh to create this stop-motion representation of the Google Assistant. —James Bareham
The future success of Uber is currently in the hands of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. In early May, Khosrowshahi sat down for an exclusive interview with Verge transportation reporter Andrew Hawkins at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles during the 2018 Elevate Summit. Los Angeles based photographer Philip Cheung joined Andy to shoot this wonderfully epic series of portraits. —James Bareham
I took many test shots in preparation for this portrait session with the amazing musician Serpentwithfeet. But my favorites were the experimental photographs I took toward the end of the session, the ones using slower shutter speeds and with fewer fill lights. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
The scope of the shoots for our “What’s in Your Bag” series has grown over the course of the year and now regularly include stop-motion animation. Michele Doying’s shoot with Lakeith Stanfield shows how movement can add so much to a portrait. —James Bareham
In June, Ford announced that it bought the iconic (and long abandoned) Michigan Central Station in Detroit and had plans to turn this neglected building into a hub for Ford’s future development of autonomous vehicles. Michigan-based photographer Fabrizio Costantini shot an astonishing photo essay of the building, but perhaps the most impressive photos were those taken using a drone. —James Bareham
Photographer Alex Welsh shot these eerily beautiful photographs of the Salton Sea, California’s largest lake, for our long-form feature. Today, the lake, which once attracted more visitors than Yosemite, is drying up and threatens local communities with clouds of toxic dust. —James Bareham
Verge deputy editor Liz Lopatto is the proud owner of one of The Boring Company’s “Not a Flamethrower.” The “flamethrower” (which I insist is really a glorified bunsen burner) has little practical use, so Liz decided to use it for cooking. Verge video director and photographer Vjeran Pavic documented her experiments in extreme cooking from a safe distance. —James Bareham
Bram has been driving Radio Flyer’s Star Wars Landspeeder around all summer, and I knew I wanted to shoot some pictures of him driving in it. The afternoon doing this was a ton of fun, and I particularly like the profile image (and the gif!). —Andrew Liptak
As I mentioned in my introduction, striving for consistency in our photographs has been a big goal in 2018. Perhaps nothing demonstrates how a consistent approach can benefit a subject better than our camera reviews. Where possible, we used the same black background and matched both the lighting and composition on each camera review, making them look distinctly Verge. Amelia Holowaty Krales shot the four examples above. —James Bareham
One of the highlights of 2018 was this portrait shoot with Natalie Wynn, which I shot to accompany Katherine Cross’ story on the YouTube star. It was such a treat to spend the afternoon with her, and she was such a pro, completing four (!) different costume changes. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
The launch of the VergeScience YouTube channel is one of the undoubted highlights of 2018. In a few short months, the channel has amassed over 600,000 followers and produced videos with millions of views. Verge Science producer William Poor shot this photograph of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station on San Onofre State Beach about 60 miles north of San Diego. —James Bareham
The Verge and Curbed got together this year to build a real life Home of the Future in Austin, Texas. Along with the video crew and host Grant Imahara, I endured days of record-hot summer temperatures to shoot this ground-breaking (literally) series. —James Bareham
This first photograph was taken over Croatia. During the flight, I was mostly focused on recording video. But when this blue kayak started rowing through my frame I had to quickly switch to photo mode. Easily one of my favorite photos that I have taken with a drone to date.
The biggest challenge that comes from bringing a drone to Iceland is resisting the urge to fly it all the time. One reason is to save batteries; the other one is to appreciate the nature around you. I think this one was worth draining the batteries and it also gives me the perspective I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. So, win win? —Vjeran Pavic
A. Human was an exhibit during New York Fashion Week showcasing possibilities in single-use, decorative prosthetic-like appliques that adhere to the wearer’s skin. It was a bizarre exhibition. The dimly lit space had theatrically lit pedestals where live models were displaying the decorative pieces alongside mannequins. The foot-skin boot was especially strange. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
This shot of Michele Doying wearing the Anker Soundcore Liberty Lite wireless earbuds was my favorite in the shoot. It didn’t make it into the final review, so it’s a great excuse to drop it in here. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
Verge Science motion graphics director Alex Parkin shot this behind-the-scenes photograph of Verge Science producer William Poor holding one of the domesticated foxes featured in the video. The video is one of Verge Science’s most successful, wracking up over 5,264,073 views to date. —James Bareham
The Apple Watch Series 4 is widely regarded as the smartwatch Apple finally got right. Vjeran Pavic got suitably technical with his photography for Dieter Bohn’s review. Vjeran used a light modifier as a background and plexiglass to create mirrored reflections and graphic shapes. Definitely one of our most impressive product shoots of the year —James Bareham
When it came to creating a lead image for our review of the very impressive Google Pixel 3 and 3 XL, we went back to a technique we first used for our review of the Galaxy S8 in 2017. The only difference was that instead of shooting the phone laying on an iMac screen as I had with the S8, the Pixel 3 was shot standing on the screen of a 4K TV. Verge design director William Joel once again created a stunning wallpaper design for the Pixel screen (you can find all of The Verge’swallpapers here) and Vjeran Pavic brought the plexiglass he used on his Apple Watch Series 4 shoot over from San Francisco. This lead image was the result of a real team effort. —James Bareham
As with Geneva, I shot the Paris auto exhibition entirely with the Pixel 2 XL, which boasts a camera that could only possibly be replaced by the Pixel 3 XL’s. The sheer convenience of having such a powerful camera built into my phone meant I probably shot a whole lot more cars in Paris than I would have done if I needed to reach into my backpack for a DSLR or mirrorless shooter. —Vlad Savov
On our way back from shooting some shots of Chaim Gartenberg wearing the new Fitbit Charge 3, we got caught in the rain and took shelter under cover of The Verge’s office building in downtown Manhattan. In a covered area on one side of the building are a bunch of these amazing bright red Herman Miller-designed chairs. I plopped the watch down into the middle of one of them and it created a very abstract background. A very unexpected win! —Amelia Holowaty Krales
I have described Amelia Holowaty Krales’ review photos of the iPhone XR as having an almost Instagram style. I think this photo of The Verge social video producerMariya Abdulkaftaking a selfie in a Brooklyn bar makes it clear why. —James Bareham
As a fan of Jess Glynne, this was definitely a highlight of 2018 for me. Jess has an amazing voice, a recent new album, and a few awesome things in her bag. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
Fadil El Ghoul, aka R3HAB, is a boundless ball of energy and a delight to interview and photograph. He also carries an astonishing number of nutritional supplements in his bag. —James Bareham
Inspired, no doubt, by the success of his Apple Watch Series 4 photos, Vjeran Pavic once again turned to minimal reflections for his shoot of Google’s new Pixel Slate. —James Bareham
RED’s Hydrogen One phone holds the dubious record of being the lowest rated Verge review. Ever. However, I do appreciate how Red’s designers went outside the box a bit and included industrial elements not seen in other phones. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
Chaim Gartenberg and I took advantage of an unseasonably warm November day to stick our hands in a water fountain not far from The Verge’s office in lower Manhattan. Look, ma, it’s waterproof! —Amelia Holowaty Krales
The Unagi is a high-end scooter designed for the discerning aficionado who doesn’t ever feel the need to stop suddenly. For an electric scooter that can cost up to $1,190, the brakes are shockingly bad. Transportation reporter Andrew Hawkins had the dubious task of putting the scooter through its paces. —James Bareham
The Verge photo team shot two different gift guides this year: the Back to School Gift Guide and our Holiday Gift Guide. We used exactly the same approach to photography for both. We worked with Michael Moore, The Verge’s reviews coordinator, to lay out the principle items from the guide in an isomorphic arrangement which would then be photographed by Amelia Holowaty Krales. She would then hand the set over to Michele Doying, who created stop-motion animations based on the lead image and other ideas for use on social media. This process worked so well we’re going to carry it into 2019 — we just have to pick some different background colors. —James Bareham
Our final selection of images from 2018 comes from The Verge’s visit to Tesla’s Gigafactory just east of Reno, Nevada, and its factory in Fremont, California. Reporter Sean O’Kane shot so many good photographs inside and around both facilities that we seriously considered running a second photo essay alongside the main feature. Verge video director Becca Farsace captured some incredible aerial footage of the Gigafactory nestled in the hills of the Nevada desert. This final feature and video were a fittingly epic way of closing out a very busy, and very intense, 2018.
