Time for another throwback

Hello everyone! It's Sunday and that means it's time for another blog post. This post is coming out later then usual as I normally write these on Saturday and then post them on Sunday morning but last night Jeannie and I went out to celebrate a friends birthday and it was also daylight savings time so that is my excuse. Ok on with the blog

For this week I wanted to do a throwback to a cool place that my friend Nita and I explored. She had told me about this old leaning barn that was in the middle of nowhere in southern Virginia. My friend and urban exploring buddy Sterling had shot the barn and the pictures were amazing and I decided that I needed to see this place for myself. 

We hit the road very early in the morning as we wanted to get to the location for sunrise and it was about a 90 minute drive to get there. After a couple of wrong turns we made it just as the sun was coming up. Got out my camera and got this shot.

I fell in love with this shot. The contrails from the planes and the road all led up to the barn. After this shot the sun was really starting to come up so it was time to try to get some different angles of this amazing barn.

The crazy in me decided to go inside to see if there was anything of interest in the barn. I felt that is was stable enough and I made sure to stay by the door so I could jump out quickly if I needed too. All that I really saw inside was a bunch of empty bottles of DDT.

As I was finishing up taking my photos I decided to get one last shot and I shot this HDR photo which turned out to be my favorite shot of the day. This is 5 shot HDR.

After i processed these i decided to make prints out of the first picture I shoed and this last one. The first one I had printed on canvas and the HDR I had printed on metal. When I got the metal print back i was floored on the amount of detail in the photo and how much it popped. I have hung both of these at the gallery and have sold a few prints of each. Every first Friday I get so many nice comments on this photo and I also get asked if I photoshopped the lean into the barn. I have to tell them that I am not anywhere near the skill level to do something like this in post. 

Now for the sad news. About a month after I shared these pictures another friend of mine made the drive up to photograph the barn and all he found was a pile of rubble. I am not sure what made the barn finally fall but it made me sad as I wanted to go back again and photograph it in different lighting conditions.

Well thats going to do it for this weeks post. If you would like to see these images in person please come see me at the gallery on the first Friday of every month. I am at 311 Gallery located at 311 W. Martin St. in downtown Raleigh. I will see you next Sunday for another post. 

Time for another throwback. This time with Emily.

For this week I didn't have anything new to share (but I will next week) so I decided to do another throwback blog post. For this one I wanted to share some of my favorite images that I have taken of one of my good close friends and an amazing model Emily. 

Emily and I met a couple of years ago at a Christmas party and I knew right away that we were going to be close friends. We messaged each other quite a few times and then we set up a shoot at Raven Rock State park.

We met and walked around the park for a while looking for areas to shoot. I saw a really nice formations of rock and we started to shoot.

We had a wonderful shoot and we knew that we had to plan another one.

My friend Nita had taken me to this property that she had permission to shoot at and it had a wonderful mountaintop view. I told Emily about it and we set up the shoot

On the day of the shoot while driving up there we knew that there was a threat of thunderstorms but we decided to risk it and shoot anyway. We hiked up the mountain and when we got to the location I could see the storm clouds rolling in and i knew we had about 15 minutes to shoot and then we would be getting the bad weather. I quickly set up and did our shoot. I have to say the storm clouds made the shoot .

After I took this last shot I told Emily that we had to leave the mountain. I quickly packed up my gear and Emily barely had a chance to get dressed as almost hurricane force winds started blowing around us. We started running down the mountain and I almost lost my way as the trail we came up now had a tree down across it so I didn't recognize the trail. Emily only in her underwear and I ran down the mountain to the car and to safety. I have to say I was scared that we were going to get struck by lightning or have a tree fall on us during the run down the mountain but it was all worth it.

For the last shoot that I want to share this week Emily and I went to a spot along the Eno river where I had assisted my friend Paul on a shoot a few weeks earlier and I knew that I had to come back to this awesome location. For this shoot we were going to do a fine art shoot and get Emily in the river posing along all of the rock formations in the river. Again there was another storm brewing but we had a lot more time to shoot before the weather would hit us. The water was nice and warm and I even waded in the water with my camera to get these shots.

Well that is it for today. I have a wonderful shoot lined up on Sunday morning with a model named Jackie and we are going to shoot at an abandoned house in the woods next to my apartment complex and i look forward to sharing them with you next week.