Justin Mein Photography

Hello Everybody! I'm back to write the second edition of my blog. 

One good thing about living in Maryland is that we get to enjoy the 4 seasons. We usually get snow during the winter, sweltering heat in the summer, lots of rain in the spring, and (my favorite!) beautiful colors in the fall. I live very close to the Virginia/Maryland border where there is a state park off of the Potomac river called Great Falls. This place is awesome if you are ever looking for a good hike. Filled with dangerous cliffs and zig zagging foot trails.  The water never gets too wild in the river but you do see the occasional kayaker. Occasional? Actually a lot of them there all the time. lol Any how the park is beautiful but especially beautiful in the fall.  There are all kinds of reds, oranges, and yellows in the trees. So Ian and I have been wanting to head up there and take some pictures to capture the Autumn season for a while so we thought what better time than 5 am! lol. We wanted to take advantage of the soft light you get during a sunrise. This is actually the second time we have made plans to shoot some thing at that ungodly hour in the morning and actually went through with it. Dragging my self out of bed at that time in the morning when I don't have to for work is  definitely a challenge. This place, Great Falls, is always packed. Its a very popular place to spend a day on the weekend if your a local. So pulling into the parking lot, (if you can call it that, its more like a dirt plot with some rocks and some port a' potty's lol) and being the only ones there this time was a bit odd. So with the sun coming up fast we ran down the trail to find a place that Ian had in mind to catch the sunrise. Did i mention that this trail wasn't the safest thing to be running down with thousands of dollars of camera equipment on your back! lol It really was nice; the air was very crisp and it wasn't too chilly outside once we got moving. Perfect weather- really something you need sometimes to get away from the every day. It was especially peaceful being the only people there. So we got going. The sun is always hard to catch just right because once it starts coming up, it does so very quickly! lol. 

I got some great stuff . It was funny because right as we were finishing up, about 6 other photographers showed up, doing the same thing we were doing I'm assuming. I wanted to shout down to them "awwww too late we already shot that!" lol but I'm a nice guy and I didn't. So any way, here are some early samples from our shoot. We shot all our images in HDR and it really does something special for a land scape.  This is my first time experimenting with it and I've got to admit that it is addicting. 

Until next time,

-Justin