More sunrise over the Mather Gorge, Great Falls National Park, Virginia/Maryland

I like this one more.

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Other news

Two things I forgot to add–

I’m just beginning the daunting task of completely revamping my website! Seeing as I am still six months behind with my processing, it’ll be a few months in the making, that’s for sure. Also, I’m enrolled for classes at Northern Virginia Community College for this fall, where I’ll attend for a year before transferring to another school.

Sunrise over the Mather Gorge, Great Falls National Park, Virginia/Maryland.

Hey there,

I hope everybody enjoyed the past holiday weekend. I sat around and did a whole lot of nothing, and it was honestly wonderful. Over the past few weeks, and hopefully for the next few weeks, I’ve been trying to make the most of local summer photo ops. I’ve been concentrating on the White-tailed Deer fawns up in Big Meadows of Shenandoah National Park, sunrises, sunsets, and the resident Great Blue Herons of Great Falls National Park, and I’ve been searching for decent locations to photograph Least Bittern and Pied-billed Grebe, since they’re among the few area birds that are easily photographed in the summer that we have here. If all goes as planned, some time soon I’ll be making a weekend trip up north to photograph Common Loons.

Anyhow, I’ve been making many a sunrise/sunset trip to Great Falls over the past few weeks. I haven’t had great luck with the Herons, but on a morning trip with my friend Chris, we had this nice sunrise.

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Screw Auger Falls, Gulf Hagas Preserve, Maine

Hey everybordy,

It has been a while, I know! I’ve been extremely busy since returning from Maine, and haven’t had much time to shoot or work on the computer! I’m wrapping up with processing my Maine shots, and here’s one I’d like to share with you all. Ian and I hiked the Gulf Hagas Preserve, in the north woods of Maine, on a cold and wet day. Luckily, the cold weather kept the blackflies away. However, the mosquitoes were in full force! This was the first waterfall we encountered, Screw Auger Falls, and it was by far my favorite.

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Puffin Preen, Machias Seal Island, Maine, USA (Or is it Nova Scotia, Canada? Depends on who you ask.)

Continuing with the theme of posting photos from my Maine outing, here’s a favorite of mine from Machias Seal Island. Ian Plant and I went out with Bold Coast Charters on a puffin tour to the island. We left out of Cutler, Maine and had absolutely perfect sea conditions for the hour long ride each way. Once we got on the island, it was ninety minutes of non-stop shutter clicking. I shot about 2000 exposures! We had excellent conditions with a light overcast cloud cover, and the wind coming from behind us, so I shot tons of portraits, head shots, group shots, and even some flight images that I’m really excited to process.

Anyhow, I’m tired and don’t feel like writing much at the moment, so I’ll shut up and post the picture That’s all you guys are here for, riiiiight?

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R.B. Ricketts Falls, Ricketts Glen State Park, Pennsylvania

Hey everybody,

On my way home from Maine, thanks to the rainy weather, I stopped by Ricketts Glen State Park, in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Thanks to tons of precipitation having come through in the few days before my visit, I was treated to some beautiful conditions. The forest and ground were just saturated with moisture, and the water in the streams was up considerably high. Ricketts Glen is the kind of place where I feel like it’s almost impossible to come up with any good photographs unless there is high water. Below is an image I took at R.B. Ricketts Falls, alongside Glen Leigh.

On a different note, in Shenandoah National Park the White-tailed Deer fawns have been dropping in full force, and I have just got to get up there this week to photograph them!

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To purchase a print or stock rights, please contact me. Feel free to view more of my work at my website.

Cadillac Mountain Sunset, Acadia National Park, Maine

Hey everybody,

I just got home yesterday, and the processing begins! Here’s a shot I just worked up. I had been out birding all day, and the clouds looked pretty bad. I went out to shoot sunset anyways, just in case, and I’d say it was pretty nice. I’m gonna keep this one brief, since I’ll be assisting on my man Joe’s one-day Great Falls workshop in about four hours.

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To purchase a print or stock rights, please contact me. Feel free to view more of my work at my website.

Maine day 7: Oops!

Hey everybody,

I lost the power cable to my laptop. I’ll catch up with you all when I get home!

Maine Day 3: Black-throated Green Warbler in breeding plumage, Acadia National Park, Maine

Hey everybody,

You know what? I really like doing an entry every day when I’m on multiple day outings. I don’t really like having to try to process images on my laptop, but I enjoy taking the time each evening to write one of these up.

Anyhow, today was a pretty good day. There was no dramatic light to be witnessed at sunrise nor sunset. All day long, there was a thin layer of high altitude clouds that basically acted as a diffuser for the sun. So, naturally, only one thing was on my mind. SONGBIRDS ALL DAY! I didn’t have the best luck with them today, but the ones that worked were amazing. I found this Black-throated Green Warbler that was a blast to work with. With all honesty, I probably got 5-8 keeper images of him today. Here’s one that was simple enough to process on the laptop.

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To purchase a print or stock rights, please contact me. Feel free to view more of my work at my website.

Maine Day 2: Sunrise from Cadillac Mountain, Acadia National Park, Maine

Well, today was a heck of a day! I got up and left at 4:00AM to catch a lovely 4:45 sunrise. I then spent the rest of the day chasing warblers, which was mostly a bust besides one good American Redstart. I also did a good amount of scouting during the day, and found some nice cooperative birds to try and go back to in better light.

Anyhow, I shot this scene with a GND filter, but I also bracketed exposures to blend when I get home. Regardless, this isn’t my final version of the shot, but here’s what I worked up on my craptop!

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To purchase a print or stock rights, please contact me. Feel free to view more of my work at my website.

Maine Day 1: Sunset Layers, Cadillac Mountain, Acadia National Park, Maine

Hey everybody,

I’ve just completed my first full day of shooting in Maine. It went pretty well, by my standards at least. I went out looking for birds this morning and during a brief cloudy stint this afternoon. The highlight was certainly an extremely cooperative Black-throated Green Warbler. I found tons of spots with tons of different birds for me to go back to. I’m really making an effort to get some songbirds out here, especially with all of the cloudy skies the Maine coast so graciously has to offer.

Anyway, I got caught up with the birds, and lost track of time. I had been planning a hike for sunset. I hurried from where I was birding to the summit of Cadillac Mountain, and caught the last 15 minutes of a pretty nice light show. I have some wide angle shots as well, but they require a blend, which I’m not equipped to do on my laptop. So, here’s a telephoto shot. Once again, please excuse the laptop processing.

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To purchase a print or stock rights, please contact me. Feel free to view more of my work at my website.

Misty Spring sunrise on Bear Rocks, Dolly Sods, West Virginia

Wow, it has been a whole week since I updated this. Geez. I’ve been super busy. This past weekend, I assisted on one of Joe Rossbach’s photo workshops. It was a great time, and great learning experience for me. I drove from there straight to Maine, where I’ll be photographing for the next week and a half. I’m going to have to wait another week or so for the lupines to be at their best here, so until then I’m focusing on sunrise/sunsets on the rocky coast, and breeding songbirds! I’m trying to get the most out of this spring, if that wasn’t obvious

Here’s one from the morning after the workshop. Myself, Joe, and a workshop participant, Reza, camped up on Dolly Sods overnight to catch sunrise at Bear Rocks. It was some nice light! Please excuse any errors that may be present in the processing, because this was done on my uncalibrated laptop monitor.

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Blue Jay in snow

Here’s one from this past winter. I was up in Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario, with my friend Greg Schneider. We came across an area with feeders that had over 100 blue jays, so we did what any bird photographers would do; we brought out the giant bag of peanuts and stayed for a few hours.

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Cathedral Falls, West Virginia

Chris Kayler and I explored the New River Gorge area of West Virginia a week ago. We found a lot; including but not limited to three wrong turns, very little sleep, a 4×4 track in the woods leading to the top of a runaway truck ramp on the highway, and some nice waterfalls. Cathedral Falls was by far the nicest.

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male Common Yellowthroat

Hey everybody,

I’ve been shooting a lot this spring, but it has been almost exclusively landscapes. I haven’t been giving bird and wildlife subjects too much time lately. So, I took a visit to Huntley Meadows in Alexandria, Virginia, where I photographed this striking male Common Yellowthroat. I have very little experience shooting songbirds and warblers, so I’m really looking forward to seeing what I can do over the next few weeks.

Thoroughfare Dawn

Here’s an old favorite from Shenandoah National Park last spring. I have yet to see any natural light show top this.

The Thoroughfare Gap overlook is a favorite spot of mine to photograph sunrise from in Shenandoah National Park. I had gone to the park that day to photograph White-tailed Deer fawns in Big Meadows, but when I saw this cloud formation with the clear patch of horizon on the east, I had to change my plan!

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(D/F)ogwood

Nothing too fancy. I was down on the good ‘ol Blue Ridge Parkway near Buena Vista, Virginia. Delighted with the foggy conditions, I set out to photograph dogwood trees and fresh green foliage! Here’s one I came up with.

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Clearing Piedmont

I took this photograph a few days ago, on the seventh. Chris Kayler and I took a morning trip to Shenandoah National Park hoping to photograph a waterfall or two. Much to our dismay, the clouds began to break up hours before they were forecasted to. We decided to roll with the punches, something every nature photographer knows all to0 well. Instead of hiking Overall Run, we drove Skyline Drive looking for interesting things to photograph along the way. We came across these foothills just as the clouds were clearing out of the Piedmont. Seeing gently lit foothills in contrast with fairly thick ground-level clouds, we had no choice but to stop for a while!

Here’s my best take from that morning.

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Whew!

It’s been a whole week since I last posted on here. Wow. I’ve been ridiculously busy photographing springtime scenes throughout Virginia over the past seven days. I photographed many different things in Shenandoah National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway, some waterfalls down by Covington and Blacksburg, VA, and lots more. Over the next few days I’ll be sharing some recent shots from all over Virginia’s mountains.

I’ll start with yesterday morning. I photographed sunrise atop Shenandoah National Park’s Blackrock Summit. There were two main layers of clouds; very thick, puffy, rain clouds at approximately my elevation, and a lighter, thinner cloud base a few thousand feet above. I figured my odds were pretty slim on getting a good sunrise, but I stuck with it anyways. I hit the trail in the pouring rain, with the full expectation of returning to my car with nothing more than waterlogged shoes. Just as I had hoped, the lower level of rain clouds broke for about ten minutes right at sunrise! It’s hard to say this when you have 20 duds in a row, but sometimes it’s really worth it to brave harsh or uncomfortable conditions on the off chance of some amazing light!

Here are two images I made within a few minutes of each other. Not long after the second was taken the clouds came back and drenched me yet again, so as to say “you had your chance, now get the hell out of here!” I complied.

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Spring is here!

..and I’m loving it. We’re in the middle of an entire week of rainy days, and I’ve been shooting as much as possible! Shenandoah National Park is an excellent spot for me, since it’s filled with beautiful mountain streams and is under two hours away from home. I’ve made it out there twice this week with friends, hiking and photographing.

Here are two shots I took yesterday up in White Oak Canyon.

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To purchase a print or stock rights, please contact me. Feel free to view more of my work at my website.