I've finally decided to work on a "Passion Project." My "Maryland State Parks Project" seeks to document every state park in Maryland over the course of a year. Maryland has 45 state parks, which works out to about one per week.  Eventually I'll use this footage to make a short film about ten minutes in length.

On June 16th, I shot Patapsco Valley State Park, Patuxent River State Park, and Seneca Creek State Park. I've posted my footage from Patapsco Valley below. It's actually just three shots of the McKeldin Rapids.  It feels wrong to reduce a massive and beautiful park to one location, but I don't really have time to be thorough and still finish the project within a year.

After spending the last couple weekends photographing Herons and Geese at Centennial Lake in Ellicott City, MD I'm beginning to understand the appeal of bird watching. Here are my favorite shots from the past couple weeks, in addition to a couple neat slideshows.

Virginia's Leesylvania State Park is on a peninsula that juts out into the Potomac River. Today I went hiking along the beach and I spotted a white hawk that flew into the woods, grabbed a branch, and flew back to it's nest. 

Western Maryland got a little snow last weekend so I dragged Katie out to Swallow Falls State Park for photography purposes. I managed to get some long exposure shots of Muddy Creek Falls, the tallest free-falling waterfall in the State of Maryland. 

I also managed to get a few portraits of Katie.

Look! I'm posting an actual video to my my "Video Blog." This project compares the video quality of my Nikon D5000 and Sony HDR - FX1. I eventually concluded that the the video quality of the D5000 could exceed that of the HDR-FX1 if it was equipped with the right lens. My 35 mm f/1.8 and 70 - 200 mm f/2.8 did very well but I found the kit lens to be a bit lacking.

The past couple weeks I've been shooting a fair amount of stuff out of Katie's window in Frostburg, Maryland.

And here's a time-lapse taken during a snowstorm:

Here's a long exposure of the same scene:

And here's a time-lapse of the sunset:

Yesterday I saw a group of wild turkeys at Green Ridge State Forrest. I honestly didn't even realize wild turkeys still existed. I also noticed a bunch of signs around the park offering a reward to anyone who can produce evidence leading to the arrest of someone who hunts wild turkeys.

A couple days ago, I drove up to visit Katie who is now attending Frostburg State University. On the way I stopped at Rocky Gap State Park to do some hiking. After spending 2 hours climbing 1,000 feet up to summit of Evitt's mountain, I discovered that the "Scenic Overlook" was really more of a "Gas Pipeline" and that "Evitt's homesite" was really more of a "well." While the summit was disappointing, it was still a nice hike through a relatively well maintained park. Afterwards I met Katie at the nearby Lake and we snapped a few photos.

We had our first significant snowfall a couple days ago. On Saturday I headed into the woods with a tripod, five lens and a D200. In addition to some long exposure shots of a nearby river, I got a couple decent photos of a local beaver. They're more common in Columbia then you would expect. Back when I was in High School, I once waded out into a nearby river and one darted right out in front of me. In not sure I've gone wading in the rivers since then. 

I shot one of my best timelapses the other day. It runs from Sunrise to Sunset and I love the way the shadows move across the image. I had to run an extension cord into my backyard so that my camera didn't run out of juice

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New Market Timelapse

I spent last weekend over at Katie's house in New Market, Maryland. While she was off at work I shot a timelapse at a nearby river.



I loved the composition so I headed out the next morning at 7 AM to film the same spot at sunrise. Unfortunately the sunrise shoot ended up having having a really annoying flicker.

First Post

I decided to change up my portfolio website. Here's the old design:

That background is a closeup my my girlfriend Katie's hair. I still kind of like the look but it was hard to update and terrible for search engine optimization.