One of the destinations I’d been itching to visit ever since I first passed through Oregon was Cannon Beach, home of the beautiful Haystack Rock. It was definitely a cool place to visit. 🙂

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Tags: Cannon Beach, Coast, Haystack Rock, Oregon, Sunset

So our next destination was the Painted Hills in the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. What a tongue twister! Let’s just call it the painted hills.

Getting here was a quite a drive. Not because it was way far out of the way or anything, but we had been doing a ton of driving to dodge the incoming weather. By the time we arrived here in the afternoon, the sky was totally gray, overcast, a bit rainy, and just generally photographically ugly. A bit dejected, we slumped down in our seats wondering what the heck do we do NOW? Little did we know we were in for one hell of a treat. Turns out Oregon weather is unbelievably variable and can change on a dime… 🙂

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Tags: Desert, Oregon, Painted Hills, Timelapse, Weather

After our visit to the Alvord Desert all the way on the eastern side of the state, we started slowly making our way west again as the two storms wore themselves out on the coast. One thing I LOVE about storms is their tendency to produce some spectacular clouds and photogenic scenery!

It’s been said so many times that life is about the journey, not the destination, and that’s so true… Long road trips definitely teach a person to really enjoy the ride and fully experience the journey. Whether you wind up photographing it or not, sometimes it’s the stuff along the way that that is the most memorable…

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Tags: Driving, Oregon, Painted Desert, Rain, Sunsets, Timelapse, Weather

Recently I had a fellow photographer fly in from New York to come travel and shoot with me for a week. When he arrived in Portland, we sat down together and started brainstorming where to go. You see, the day he arrived, a big thunderstorm started battering down on the west coast. As soon as that one was scheduled to pass through, yet another thunderstorm was forecasted to hit us immediately afterwards. So staying in the area to shoot wasn’t much of an option. Where should we go? We had the entire western half of the US as our playground for the next week to go drive, shoot, and explore. We could drive over to Glacier NP in northern Montana, but it was probably wintery to head that way in November. We could drive all the way down to southern Utah and shoot the Subway in Zion (perfect time of the year for that) and snowcapped hoodoos in Bryce, but that was gonna be one heck of a drive in both directions. We could head down to CA to shoot Death Valley and some of the amazing parks there, but I had recently been there and wanted to see a place I hadn’t yet been to. We could drive on up to Palouse in WA and shoot the beautiful fields there which both of us wanted to see, but the fields were pretty brown this time of the year. What to do? After exploring our options in depth, we decided to stick around in the beautiful state of Oregon and go east to avoid the weather before eventually heading back west to the coast once the storms had passed. Armed with a newly purchased copy of a Photographing Oregon, and eager to follow in Marc Adamus’ footsteps by shooting from some of the same locations he had, we started our drive eastward over the Cascade mountain range and started heading for our first destination, the Alvord Playa in the Alvord Desert.

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Tags: Desert, Oregon, Playa

It was feeling like time to go out and spend a few days getting back in the swing of things by living outdoors some more. One of the most commonly talked about places ’round Portland is the gorge. The Columbia River Gorge. What’s all the hub’bub out? I dunno… Asking around to some of the locals experienced in this area, they suggested I go visit Eagle Creek Trail in the gorge. Alrighty! Let’s do it! It definitely turned out to be a spectacular hike… full of more awesomeness than I could have dreamed possible. Let’s photoblog it and story tell it! 🙂

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Tags: Camping, Columbia River, Gorge, Greenery, Hiking, Multnomah Falls, Oregon, Punchbowl Falls, Rodents, Trees, Tunnel Falls, Twister Falls, Waterfalls

Portland’s a funky town. I like it. In Atlanta where I grew up, I always got the feeling that everything was very politically correct, businessy, somewhat conservative and restricted, following society’s conventional (boring) norms. One thing that I like about Portland is how unconventional and out of the mold it is in many ways compared to what I’m used to. One such example is when some guy went down a bike lane and started painting Mario Kart symbols on the ground. As you bike down this street, you’ll pass over slippery banana peels, dangerous red shells, powerup mushrooms, lightning bolts, and of course the legendary gold stars. 😀 It was about two months ago when these things were painted down and they are still here today. Woohoo! After hearing about this on the news, I had to figure out exactly where it was and go see it for myself. Now that I’m getting my groove back and went down to shoot a marching band competition in Eugene, OR, the photo bug is kicking back in and armed with a fresh new replacement camera in hand, it’s time to do some explorin’! 🙂

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Tags: Ducks, Eugene, Fall colors, Marching Bands, Mario Kart, Oregon, Portland, Sheep

Back when I studied abroad in Europe, I can vividly remember sitting on trail in Switzerland, reading about Dr. Langdon traveling through the Swiss Alps and looking out my window at those very mountains right that I’m reading about in the book. When I was in Paris, it was so much fun having a copy of The Da Vinci Code while I actually visited the Louvre. Similarly, one thing that’s fun about traveling is flicking on the radio and listening to the local music. With the exception of mexican music freely available on the radio when you’re anywhere in the southwest, most all the music in the States is in English (obviously), so when I talk about listening to local music it’s not gonna necessarily be as radically different as listening to French rap in France or Celtic music in Ireland. It’s more about accents, occasionally unique musical instruments (like banjos in the south), and about places you can visit actually being mentioned in a song (and visiting them yourself!), like driving down Route 66 while listening to a song about Route 66. 😉

In this post, I just feel like sharing some songs that I like that talk about various locations you can visit in the country.

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Tags: Katy Perry, Music, Owl City, Snoop Dogg, Songs

While waiting for my replacement camera gear to arrive in the mail here in Oregon, I’ve been doing some browsing online, researching more info on how to shoot timelapses and viewing other people’s work for inspiration and ideas, and I want to share with you guys some of the videos that really stand out for me, videos that really get me feeling excited and giddy, eager to go out and do the same. So here’s a collection of some really cool videos, as well as my commentary as I think out loud about pulling something like this off. 🙂

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Starting back around September, about 7 months in, I was starting to get really worn out. All the driving and traveling was really starting to take its toll on me. Not only that, but all the adventure and thrill was starting to throw my adrenals into constant overdrive and my nervous system was feeling pretty shot. The idea of going all the way up into Alaska, doing another 2,000+ miles in the name of having an intense adventurous winter full of snow and cold and long winters and mountaineering was, at this point, starting to sound less and less appealing,, though I am still very much interested in doing that eventually.

Nevertheless, I pressed on, heading on up into Canada, despite the fact that I was growing progressively more hesitant to make the long drive north. When I was in Vancouver, life dealt me an unexpected twist, totally knocking me off my bearings, and today more than a month later as I sit here and write about these events, I’m still trying to figure out what to do next. To be perfectly honest, I have no idea…

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Tags: Canada, Destressing, Emotional Processing, Friends, Oregon, Portland, Relaxing, Washington

By this point in the trip, I’m actually starting to get a bit exhausted of all the traveling. I asked myself.. “If I was a millionaire, what would I do right now?” and you know what my answer was? I’d find a nice place to go sit and do absolutely nothing! Hey wait a minute, I can do that right now! and so with that, I decided to go live like a millionaire. 😀

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Tags: Canoe, Clouds, Deer, Lake Crescent, Lakehouse, Washington

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