Vancouver’s English Bay is a beautiful area, I took this one from Jericho Beach looking towards downtown

nature is amazing. that’s all I can think after seeing this photo. the Grand Tetons were one of my favorite stops along the roadtrip. simply because they look like a painting. the whole time I’m there, I felt like I was in a museum because it was so beautiful. if I remember correctly, this one was taken from, “Grand View Point”. The big distinctive one in the middle is Mount Moran and the jagged one on the far left is the Grand Teton.

Chicago’s Millennium Park is an incredible place, after seeing it I now feel disappointed when I visit any other park in any other city… except for maybe Stanley Park in Vancouver. I really like the ghosts in this photo as the people walked through my shots.

This is an oldie but goodie. A few weeks ago when @jameswillamor and I took a flight around Uptown this picture came out nicely. When I move to Vancouver I hope to do a flyaround of that city as well.

When I think of the Appalachian mountains, I usually think of North Carolina, Virginia or Tennessee. However, this weekend Jane and I headed down to Fort Mountain State Park in North Georgia for two nights of glorious camping. Saturday, we spent the day with Tom Blue Wolf from Earth Keepers at a sweat lodge ceremony.

Sunday, Jane and I hiked to the overlook trail. The picture above is from the west overlook.

Along the trail are the mysterious remains of a stone wall that was built thousands of years ago by an unknown source. The plaques on the wall tell different stories, one about the Creek peoples attacking the moon-eyed men that built the wall. The moon-eyed men couldn’t see during certain phases of the moon and were easily destroyed during one of these phases. Also, the wall could have been built by the Welsh Prince Madoc who discovered America in 1170. Tom Blue Wolf says that the wall is part of an ancient observatory built by the Creek peoples, stretching all the way to Arkansas. But unlike our observatories where we look at the stars, men would lay along the wall and allow the stars to see us. Like the starlight that travels to Earth from dead stars millenia ago, after our death, after being in the observatory, our light travels onward for eternity.

Regardless of the reason for the wall, the view from the park is beautiful.

Some HDR photos can be too vibrant and too gaudy. I think this one straddles the line between just enough and way too much. Your own personal preference may swing you one way or the other. To compare the scene to HDR vs. non-HDR check these two links:

The HDR image above, created from 3 exposures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jritch/3455631925/

The original: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jritch/3412307798/in/set-72157616345253164/

Clearly the HDR captures and preserves more detail, but does that extra detail muddle the clarity of the original scene’s beauty?

When @jruckman and I needed to shoot some video in a highrise, we chose the Uptown Charlotte Westin because it is publicly accessible.

I wasn’t prepared for the beautiful view at the top. I see a lot of skyline photos of Charlotte but few from this angle. Sometimes my HDR pictures come out looking really gaudy and surreal but this is one of my better examples of subtly enhancing a capture using the combination of multiple exposures. I hope that my future HDR processing can follow in this pattern.

I always disliked this photo. Every time I returned to it I could do nothing but remember the beauty of the original scene.  My camera could never capture that, it transcended capture. The memory used to be so much more vivid but now as it fades, I appreciate this capture more and more, a bittersweet paradox established on the ridge at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute.

as I was hiking with Jane’s dad and uncle Rich we stopped at the top of the mountain to camp before tackling the next part of the Appalachian Trail leading towards the Nantahala Outdoor Center, the sunrise was simply amazing as we looked towards Franklin, NC

Charlotte’s under construction // on Elizabeth Ave. looking West

When Jane, Jessica, Tim and I were looking for somewhere to eat, I couldn’t resist taking this shot of center city Charlotte with sun setting in the background. My favorite part about the image, besides the colors, is the construction on the street; indicative of the city. There is construction everywhere! I’m ready to move away for a few years so that I can come back when a lot of this infrastructure is finally up and running.