Sometimes I’m lucky enough to have people give me great suggestions on subjects to shoot.  In this case, I was guided to an extremely old and run-down caboose that had been sitting at the crossroads of River Road and U.S. Route 40  for decades near Grantsville, Maryland. The caboose serves as a memorial to the Casselman River Railroad, whose rails were was pulled in 1959.  This caboose was left near Dewey Yommer’s house and service station, who was the conductor of the CRRR.  Yommer has passed on and the service station is long gone, but this caboose still remains.

This caboose had served as the playground and place of interest for many children over the years, but has now become so decrepit, the dangers of play are far too great.  However, this condition lends itself beautifully to my lens, and I took some time to try and capture the withering spirit of this old caboose and its once flurishing railroad.  View some samples below, and then follow the link at the bottom for the full gallery.

I don’t get many chances to visit rural Pennsylvania.  In fact, today was my first time here.  I have found myself visiting family members just north of the Maryland and Pennsylvania border in a small town called Salisbury.  Everywhere I look there are Amish communities.  Yup, I’m a long way from home.  It’s an entirely different league of beauty here, with vast farm fields and forests of maple trees linked together with a webbing of tubes, draining the sweetness for maple syrup and other delicious goodies.

This morning, I woke up before dawn to try and photograph the tranquility and peaceful nature of this wonderful area during sunrise.  What I got was fog, and lots of it.  As the morning grew into day, the fog rolled in and out, thick one minute, light the next.  I slogged carefully through the fields, hoping not to offend the Amish with my camera, thankful that they don’t observe daylight savings time.  That gave me an extra hour of shooting before they began their days of hard work.

Washington D.C. is an amazing city.  I was lucky enough to make a visit to our nation’s capitol, my first as an adult with a full understanding of its history.  Also, this was to be my first time there as a photographer.  To me, this meant I had a duty to try all I could to capture its grandeur and beauty.

Unfortunately, DC is one of those cities that has been photographed millions of times by many incredible photographers in exactly the same way.  This can be an intimidating thought, no doubt about it.  The objective of a any creative photographer is to capture a scene in a way no one ever has before.   Leading up to my trip, I started feeling a bit overwhelmed with this task.  I thought there would be no way that I could be proud of the shots I would come home with, since there was to be no way of making them truly unique. That may sound extremely pessimistic, but no one wants to re-create work already made by someone else when their purpose is to create their own.

What surprised me, however, was that when I found myself sharing the same space as the incredible and powerful monuments and memorials of Washington D.C., it no longer mattered to me if what I was capturing was unique.  It only mattered that I captured what I experienced.  My goal immediately changed to concentrate on photographing D.C. the way I saw it, no matter if the images I produced were complete carbon copies of other photographers’ work.

This change in attitude came not ten minutes after we parked our car.  We noticed that the streets were being blocked off by police officers, and suddenly  there was no traffic along Constitution Avenue.  Zero cars.  It was like looking down a street of a deserted town.  We immediately suspected that President Obama’s motorcade was about to make an appearance.  Luckily we were right.  Minutes later, the motorcade zoomed by, and I snapped away at 3.5 frames per second.  I had no idea if Obama was in the car or not until I reviewed the photos on my LCD screen.  When I saw that I indeed had gotten a fairly clear shot with him in the back seat, I was thrilled.

From that point on, I decided to make the days’ shots my own.  It was, after all, my own personal experience with Washington D.C.