Thanksgiving – JWNPhoto.com

Articles Tagged with: Thanksgiving

Hanging Rock State Park

Hanging Rock

Every year, my family picks a spot to spend Thanksgiving and we all come together to eat and enjoy a beautiful and/or fantastic location. This year we ventured to Hanging Rock State Park in North Carolina.

Now, I’ve fashioned myself as a people photographer over the past couple of years, but it’s fun every once in a while to slow down and shoot some scenery.

Lower Cascades Falls

Waking up at 5:30AM to catch the sunrise is not something I usually have to do, but if you want to get a shot like this, you’re going to have to hike up a mountain in the dark:

Hanging Rock

I still managed to take some shots of my family as well. Here’s my wife with her brothers and sister under a waterfall:

Hidden Falls

And here’s my kids at another waterfall. The park has 5 different waterfalls you can hike to.

Window Falls

There’s a reason why this waterfall is called “Window Falls”, as illustrated in the following shot:

Window Falls

Taking portraits with a very slow shutter speed is quite the challenge. It felt akin to old school portraiture where the subject had to hold perfectly still to get the proper exposure. Here, we’re trying to get the falls to look smooth while keeping ourselves sharp. This is a self-portrait with my son:

Upper Cascades Falls

Speaking of self-portraits, here’s one I made while we played with light painting at night:

And here’s a self-portrait I made up on the Hanging Rock:

I leave you with one last shot from underneath the rock. I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving as well!

Hanging Rock

You can check out all of my vacation photos on this set on Flickr.

My Favorite Shot From Vacation

Last week I was enjoying some time off for the Thanksgiving holiday with my family at Disney World. I posted some of my more “artsy” shots in an article earlier this week and mentioned that I still haven’t shown you my favorite shot of the trip. The shot at the top of this article was the result of the perfect storm of outdoor lighting. Most of my shots from that day during that time were in very hard mid-day sunlight. At one point, the clouds behind me covered the sun, while the sky in the background was a very saturated blue. I quickly looked around for a spot and saw some kids running around on this grassy hill (which I don’t think they wanted people walking on). In a mini panic, I begged everyone in our party to get up on the hill for a family portrait. Below is the shot of everyone that was available to me. After that, I knew the clouds were moving and I told everyone to do something silly, like jump, before the light changed. Well, that lost a few of my models, but I managed to grab the shot above regardless. I particularly enjoy the contrast of the boys vs. girls. The girls gave 100%, while the boys halfheartedly lifted one leg each.

I’m almost done sorting through my vacation pictures, I’ve got well over 100 of them in a set on my Flickr page.

Not much else to report as I’ve been buried at work this week, I just wanted to quickly share those two photos with you. When the light is right, you need to take advantage of it (even if you look like a raging maniac in the eyes of your loved ones when it happens).

Happy Thanksgiving

Just a quick post from the Magic Kingdom from my family to you. We have a lot to be thankful for, especially these two happy and healthy kids who we get to spoil every now and again!

This picture was taken with my camera by one of the street photographers on Main Street.