Sometimes you have to follow your subject for hours – through vineyards, a cave, a jeep ride (or seven) and into a hidden, dark cellar – for the one candlelit moment that captures his or her personality perfectly. So it went with food-and-wine issue cover boy Gary Pisoni.

Other times you have to sort through hundreds of completely serviceable shots to isolate the one with enough wisdom and weariness to honor what it means to be Al Jardine. And sometimes the adjustment of one small detail can bring the big consequences a photo needs: In having deep-thinking social biologist Rebecca Costa simply close her eyes, all her impossible-to-completely-corral concepts were encapsulated with one image.

In other words, a powerful portrait can come together in any number of ways. But no matter how it happens, it somehow grips an oh-so-elusive thing – identity – like nothing else can.

To mark the end of the year, Weekly photographer Nic Coury pored over scores of such portraits from 2010. His 40 favorites are now available for viewing at www.mcweekly.com/2010portraits. In them you might see something you recognize – in catching many of Monterey County’s newsmakers in their contexts, he secured a little bit of all of us.

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