Photography/Videography

I got interested in photography when I was in middle school and took my first photography class. The science behind how it worked and the process of framing the picture and then developing it with an enlarger was captivating. I quickly became attached to my parents SLR.

In college I got my first digital camera (4 whole megapixels baby!) and a few years later my first DSLR. That’s when my fascination really took off. Living in the mountains of Virginia gave me lots of nearby opportunities to go out and find beautiful settings to capture.

Later I started experimenting with high speed photography. My (now) wife and I would spend hours trying to get enough light into the camera so we could capture something using the built in shortest shutter speed. Later I found a kit to build your own flash triggering circuit for high speed photography. Once the kit was delivered I made the circuit on the included breadboard in no time. Then the fun began!

We would sit in pitch black, open the shutter, and trigger a flash using an acoustic trigger. We began taking pictures of BB’s hitting paintballs, then water balloons being shot. Next, using a photodiode trigger, we started capturing water drops which turned into a several thousand image exercise that continued into my time after college. I was even invited to do a show with my images that were captured!

Eventually the cell phone cameras were getting so good and my DSLR was feeling dated, so I put it down for several years. But I couldn’t get away from still trying to take good pictures with point and shoots and our cell phones.

I’m happy to say we got a new DSLR a few years ago and I jumped right back into photography outings! My recent fascination has been astrophotography. The techniques are very different with the preferred method requiring several long exposures that are combined in photoshop in post. This also requires especially dark locations, even the moon creates “light pollution” that gets in the way of the shot! This has me on the search for places that are dark and timing trips around the lunar phases.

In addition to photography over the last few years I’ve been putting more effort into videography as well. We often go to interesting places on our off-roading trips and I realized I wanted to capture video of them. I quickly realized that the camera needed to be stabilized, which became a project. I also learned video editing was quite the process! In 2018 I got more serious about video editing and made several videos of our adventures and continued to evolve my tools.