Getting There from Here and Back Again: 2017 Edition

Mike and I have been travelling from Maine to Moab, UT in the spring for three years now to teach night sky photography workshops. As Moab is nearly equidistant from five good-sized airports – Salt Lake City, UT, Las Vegas, NV, Denver, CO, Phoenix, AZ and Albuquerque, NM – we could fly in to any of these airports and then rent a vehicle. The first year we chose Salt Lake City and the second year we chose Las Vegas. Though both choices allowed us to conveniently visit other locations along the way to and from Moab, we thought making a true road trip out of it for spring 2017 would give us even more opportunities to explore and become inspired.

As most landscape photographers and lovers of beautiful scenery will attest, you’ll rarely see arresting views along highways at speeds of 55 mph to 85 mph. So, we factored in a few areas we wanted to see that were just off, or reasonably near, some major cross-country highways. Then we wound up taking a lot of back roads and Scenic Byways.

This image, Light in the Forest, was shot three years ago. I was driving down a recently-plowed country road not far from my house near the center of the little Maine town I’ve called home for the last ten years. I was driving slowly due to the rough road conditions and happened to peek down a driveway I’d never noticed before. Initially, I simply saw an opening ...

Ritual is a new work that was created on a warm, summer-like night in New Hampshire during the early October new moon. I had become enchanted by the idea of capturing the alignment of the Milky Way with a stone and wood gazebo located in the White Mountains National Forest. We had seen some great photographs of this spot and we wanted to put our own spin on it.