This year’s Northwest String Summit was nothing short of incredible.  It’s an annual bluegrass music festival during which I shot photos last year, but in order to fully enjoy the weekend, I only had my camera in hand for one of the days… the last day.  All year I felt a slight regret for that fact.  This year, my goal was to shoot as much as possible, but still find the balance with seeing the fun through my own eyes instead of the lens.

String Summit is held at one of my favorite places to shoot, Horning’s Hideout in North Plains, Oregon.  To me personally, it’s one of those places that holds a lot of history and magic.  As a photographer, it is one of those places that looks beautiful in even the harshest of mid-day light.  The only problem is that it is also a notoriously dusty place.   This meant that if I wanted to shoot all weekend, I would have to keep it protected.  So I decided to do a test run of Think Tank Photo’s Digital Holster 50.  It’s features also let me keep my camera ready to fire, even with my longest lens, the Canon 70-200mm f/2.8, even with the lens hood attached.  This new bag allowed me to conveniently carry my camera around the festival, with total confidence that it would be protected, but still instantly ready for shooting.  All I had to do was pull it out of the bag and fire away.

So.. camera in hand, I decided my focus would be on the people and scene of String Summit, not necessarily the music. The first of which was the annual String Summit Tutu Mafia, which had grown in size significantly since last year.  I was impressed with the turnout and the abundance of pure style shown within this year’s Mafia.  We managed to get in a photo shoot in at camp before heading to the venue.  The glamor was in full effect as the tutus waved and fluttered in the sun. This year we were treated with tutus of orange, blue, pink, red, yellow, and many other different colors worn by a wide range of people. Which Tutu Mafia member is your favorite?

The always adorable kids’ parade was Saturday afternooon.  The young ones worked so hard creating their costumes and decorations to show off in their parade, and their efforts did not go unnoticed.  Led by Tyler Fuqua in his incredible custom-made dragon costume, they proudly wandered through the crowd.  Some were more nervous than others, but it was my friend Amelia who was shining the brightest, towering above all others on her stilts! How can you not love the kids’ parade?

A couple of tiny lost creatures found their way into our camp at one point during the festival, and I couldn’t resist taking out the macro lens to get some good close-up shots.  One was a small but beautiful butterfly who seemed very interested in our camp flowers.  She fluttered around each blossom, not minding that myself and fellow photographer Carlton Ward fussed about trying to get the right shot. The other was a tiny little inchworm crawling across a friend’s finger.  That little guy didn’t have a care in the world as he slowly explored the ins and outs of his new friend’s hand. We were careful not to drop him as I snapped frame after frame, trying to keep him in sharp focus.  I guess String Summit isn’t always just about the people and music!

Horning’s was as magical as ever through that weekend.  I saw everything from a didgeridoo playing rooster to a team of fun loving people calling themselves Gang Green.  I was honored to receive a green star on my belly by a real-life Sneetch, and I stunningly read our manaquin’s jail release papers. Who knew he was such a criminal?  I left the weekend thankful I live so close to a wonderful scene, fulfilled musically by all the incredibly talented artists, and so very grateful I got to share it with my amazing group of friends.   Until next year, Strummit!

Here are a few more sample photos, but feel free to skip straight to 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.