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.