Love Rocks

During a summer geology field trip to the Colorado Plateau, my professor had his one-year wedding anniversary. His wife flew out to be with him and camped with him and the class for a few days. When we visited this arch, they posed for one of the students in the class to take a photo. I was on the backside of the arch, taking photos from a different perspective, and caught this embrace at the perfect moment. The way I processed this photo turned it more into a work of art than a photograph, but I thought that the composition was powerful enough that any detail in the rock itself was unnecessary.

Raku

During elementary school, I began taking ceramics classes at The Art League in Alexandria, VA because watching potters throw pieces on the wheel had always fascinated me. I loved it, and continued taking classes through high school. To maintain my skills, I took an advanced ceramics course my freshman year of college, and one of the students was a 70-year-old man who basically had his own ceramics studio and kilns in his basement and backyard. He invited the rest of the class over to help him do a raku firing, which involves taking the still-glowing pieces out of the kiln, throwing leaves or other organic material at them, and then smothering them under a metal pail on a sawdust bed. This dramatic technique yields dramatic colors, and this close-up of one of the pieces I helped him fire shows the textures and sheen that result from raku.

Steam Vents

Night photography thrills me, but my equipment consists of nothing more than a tripod, so I am always looking for alternative sources of light that will provide an atmosphere suitable for long exposures. On the night I took this photo, the sunken gardens at the College of William and Mary were draped in fog. I had to go out and shoot because I knew the fog would beautifully diffuse the light from the lamps lining the walks; as it turned out, the steam vents in the ground provided another diffuser as well as an interesting focus. At the College, students pass down legends about secret tunnels accessed by these steam vents, so with this photo, I tried to convey both the ethereal quality of the night and the enigmatic nature of these tales.

Fortuitous Test

During the first month of my freshman year at William and Mary, I went on a field trip with the geology department. We camped next to the James River and then canoed down it the next morning, stopping to look at geologic features along the way. It was great, and a significant factor in my decision to major in geology. However, there were unadvertised class 2 rapids, and my canoe flipped, dumping me, but more importantly, my camera, into the James. It was completely immersed for at least 10 seconds, so I took no more photos that trip. I let it dry out for an entire stressful day and took it out to the sunken gardens the next night to test it out. A product of that tentative shoot, this photo thankfully confirmed that there didn't seem to be any water stains inside the lens.