I live and work in the Washington, DC area. I make my living as a renewable energy lawyer, but I have been an active photographer since I was a child. For the last fifteen years, I have concentrated on landscape photography, primarily in the areas around Washington, DC, including Great Falls, the C&O Canal, and the Potomac River.
Landscape images of the American west by Ansel Adams and others are extremely well known, and many photographers from the Washington area bemoan how far they are from those classic subjects. However, the Washington area is also full of great photographic opportunities. Great Falls is an amazing natural photographic subject, and the C&O Canal and the Potomac River are soothing counterpoints to the wildness of the falls. Washington itself is a beautiful city that many people travel thousands of miles to see each year. Clyde Butcher, the famous Everglades photographer, has said that as photographers, we have to accept that we can’t all live and photograph in Yosemite (Ansel Adams' home for years), and that our best photography will come from exploring subjects that are close to where we live, no matter where that is. I have been fortunate to have photographic subjects like these so close to my home.
These photographs represent a modest effort to capture the beauty of subjects such as the Falls, the River and the Canal. However, they also demonstrate their fragility, since even though these images are only a few months or years old, many of them could no longer be taken due to changes that have occurred since they were made. For example, “Lock 7 in Fog”, which has been one of my most frequently requested photographs over the years, would look very different now, since the National Park Service has been forced to add braces to stabilize the lock walls. Similarly, many of the photographs from Fletcher’s Boat House could not be taken today because upstream changes to the Potomac River have caused huge silt build-ups in the cove where the Fletcher photographs were taken. Each of these changes diminishes our experience, to a greater or lesser degree, and serves as a reminder of how much we stand to lose if these resources are not treasured and protected.
Like many photographers, I learned my craft with traditional film cameras, and I continue to shoot black and white film and develop and print in a wet darkroom. However, recently I have been exploring the creative possibilities offered by digital photography. The images on this site have been taken with a variety of classic and contemporary cameras. However, my day-to-day photographic tools are a Mamiya 7 and a Canon 5D Mark II. The Mamiya 7 is a medium format (6x7) film camera, and I shoot with Kodak TMAX 100 film. The Canon 5D is a 21 MB digital SLR. I use a variety of lenses with each camera.
