This year Maryland can’t decide if it is summer or spring. On one of the first warm hikes at Liberty Lake, Luca watches the young bass. I’ve been photographing there for years. No matter the season, light on the water never stops amazing me. I can shoot black and white or color, makes no difference.

This picture was taken during a portrait session for a dance school application. I love shooting portraits for artists. The thing I like about dancers is their ability to make movement look so elegantly effortless.

Lighting the fire at dinner is one of the sweetest times during our camping trips. Nights in Antietam are always very special after a long, lazy day by the creek. We have not been camping in almost two years and we are anxious to return. I love shooting night photographs when the fog comes through our camp site. Sometimes we do a night ride on our mountain bikes over to the beautiful and historic Burnside Bridge and then meander through the battle ground. We’ve also canoed down the creek in the pitch dark…amazing ride! This June will be our first trip in far too long and I, for one, can already smell the campfire.

I was commissioned to shoot a portrait series featuring the nurses at Johns Hopkins Hospital accompanied by bio-captions describing the important roles these nurses brought to their respective departments. Having shot at hospitals a lot over the years, I realized my biggest logistical hurdle was going to be coordinating the schedules of the doctors and nurses. So I proposed shooting pseudo-David Hockney photographic collage style. I wanted to shoot this way just in case someone was unable to make the scheduled time for the portrait sitting. This way, I could use another person as a stand-in with a white coat to fill the edge of the frame of the person who was there, come back and re-shoot the person who missed the session, then fix it in post. I was thrilled with how they turned out. It offered both a visually unique styling AND scheduling flexibility for the doctors and nurses. Final prints were 24×38 and set in a white matte with a black frame.

When I was shooting these images of my daughter, I instantly recalled the work of one of my favorite photographers, Aaron Siskind. His expertise and talent in the darkroom is almost unmatched. While in college, I had the opportunity to go through an original portfolio box of his prints from “Terrors and Pleasures of Levitation”. There are artists that stay with you. Their images come back to you through your own viewfinder. Mr. Siskind’s work is the type of work that does not translate well into books. You simply have to see his prints in person…or be standing in the right place with the right lens while your daughter is flying through the air.

Three Rivers Petroglyph Site is a high, wind-swept spot that overlooks the Chihuahuan Desert floor. It’s so near to White Sands that people overlook it on their rush to go north. The wonderful town of Cloudcroft is close. It was 80 degrees while I shot this Polaroid and when I got to Cloudcroft for dinner it was snowing.

I was so lucky with the weather to get this photo. In Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, right near Frisco Pier, I’ve learned to wait for good images. They’re always worth it. On this day, the wind was blowing the tops off of the wave crests and the tide was going out, which created a waveless but stormy space between the beach and the cresting waves. The clouds hung very low, moving out to sea. The raw power of nature in the OBX can be felt…and if you wait long enough, captured on film to be revisited again and again. (With a little luck, that is.)

Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, is one of my favorite places to photograph. I have been shooting photos in the Outer Banks (OBX) for more than 25 years. Diamond Shoals during a storm is magical because of the unbelievable power of confluence of the Labrador and Florida Currents. Surfers and sports fishermen are lured there by the intensity of the waves and the diversity of the fish. And scuba divers are drawn there to explore the many, many shipwrecks that rest on Hatteras’ sea floor.

I love Ektachrome film. If you underexpose the background a few stops and add some flash, the colors really pop. Yes, there are digital backs for my Hasselblad but I still love to hold a chrome in my hands. Because it’s a slide, the “software” needed to see this image will never need an upgrade.

Sadly, not soon enough. Ravens preseason starts when? This shot was for an ESPN commercial, featuring Ravens’ linebacker, Ray Lewis.