gallery D

After taking a week-long hiatus from all things media (including my big time wasters: galleryD, Aperture and iMovie) I decided to finally put together a photo book from one of our trips over the past year. I’m fairly pleased with how it turned out, although I would have liked a little more flexibility with the number of pages in the book. Editing down is always a hard job for me when it comes to photos. There are a few in here that I could do without, but I couldn’t quite eliminate enough to bring it down to 26 pages, which is the next smallest size book Adorama offers.

These are pictures from Elizabeth City, Kitty Hawk and the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. These images have appeared on my blog before, but this is the first time I have put any of them together in book form. If you like the book, you can buy a copy. It is printed on top-quality Fuji Crystal Archive paper, with true lay-flat pages that allow for beautiful photo spreads. I’ll even throw in a free autograph. Seriously. Help a hungry grad student. Treat yourself to some fine art. Celebrate North Carolina’s coastal heritage — all in one move! Buy one!

Click here to view the book in greater detail, or to get your own copy.

 

 

 

 

Back in March I had a chance to catch up with my good friend Sam. He had recently returned to North Carolina after finishing his graduate program at the University of Colorado. With the blessings of our wives, Sam and I headed to Virginia for a couple days of snowboarding in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Sam and I met during our first semester at Appalachian State and ended up rooming together for the next three years, until Kristen finally agreed to marry me and I moved off campus. At ASU — due to location, wonderful student discounts and a general lack of pressing (financial) obligations — the three of us had an opportunity to go snowboarding practically as often as we were up to it; usually three or four times each week. This was the first year I have been able to make it back to the slopes since we left Blowing Rock in 2008. Sam and I spent two days at Wintergreen Resort, near Charlottesville. The weather was perfect, the slopes were fairly well covered and the crowd was relatively sparse.

Knowing how much patience and planning it would take to get any decent snowboarding shots that weren’t cliche, and, more importantly, knowing that I only had two days to enjoy the mountains, I decided to try something different with the camera. As we moved around the mountain, we just pointed the lens in a general downhill direction and held the shutter, blasting off nearly 2,000 still frames of random snowboarding action. I dropped the pictures into iMovie, added a soundtrack and created my first stop-motion video. It’s pretty rough, but you have to start somewhere, right?

Here are a few still shots I pulled out of the reel, in case you missed them.