A couple of my favorite shots from our trip to Medora, ND this year! View them all in my portfolio!

This is one of my favorite shots I got on our quick trip to Boston to tour colleges. This was taken at Beavertrail State Park in Rhode Island right after sunset!

This year we spent Christmas in Vail, CO, and we were lucky to have some beautiful weather! I brought my camera with while skiing to capture some of the mountain view while I skied down at the end of the day. 

This summer I attended a music camp in Minneapolis, and was able to capture a few photos around the University of Minnesota campus! View all of the photos I took HERE.

These are some of my favorite shots from our trip to Yosemite National Park! It was a foggy day, which allowed me to get some really artsy shots.

Our trip to Los Angeles was amazing! I got some great beach photos, along with photos from our hike near the Griffith Observatory. Most of the nights there was a dull sunset, but I got lucky on the last night when there was a gorgeous sunset off the coast of the San Clemente pier! Click HERE to view all of the photos!

Our trip to big sky was a blast! I got lots of pics of Lone Mountain, and I waited over an hour in line for the tram just to get pictures from the top of the peak! Here's a sneak peak at a couple of the images!

I got some amazing photos in Vail, Colorado! We were there for my aunt's wedding, and we stayed there some extra days to do some fun things around the area. We hiked on the mountain, biked, and went to an amusement park on the top of Vail Mountain and an amusement park in Glenwood Springs. I got some star and mountain photos, and I also got some cool pictures on the plane of the sunrise! 

On the last night we were there, I hiked a little ways up the mountain in the middle of the night and set up my camera on a tripod with a remote shutter release. I set it to take continuous 30 second exposures for two hours of the stars. Two hours later, I went out and retrieved my camera. I combined all the photos together to form the beautiful star trails, and I also made a time-lapse of the stars, which you can view below. 

A couple weeks ago we were in New York City, and I got a great variety of photos! A lot of them were taken at night from the top of the Empire State Building where the sunset that night was beautiful! Others were taken at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and I also got some of Central Park. The trees were just starting to bloom in Central Park, which made for some pretty photos of the trees! On the last day we were there we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, and when the sun went down I took some panoramas of the skyline! To view all of them click HERE.

I had such a fun time in Seattle last week! I got so many cool pictures from around the city, the space needle, and Whidbey Island! We went to Pike Place Market, and I got a lot of interesting macro photos of all of the flowers and food there. The views from the top of the space needle were amazing, and I got some cool night photos from the city from up on the top! To check out all my photos from Seattle, click HERE or go to my portfolio in the menu up top. Enjoy!

I had such a fun time in Winnipeg this weekend! The city was so pretty, and I got a lot of cool pictures! We got to go to the Museum of Human Rights, and inside the building was beautiful! There were all of these paths that went all the way to the top, and there were glass elevators that went to the top. I got some cool pictures in there! We also went to the Ice Castles, which is pretty much a giant ice castle made of icicles. I hope you enjoy these pictures!

Last week we went skiing in Whitefish, and I got some beautiful photos there! While we were there, I got some cool sunrise pictures in the morning, and got some photos of the unique trees covered in snow! The scenery was so beautiful! The last day we were there we experienced an "inversion", which is when the clouds get really low, and the air is warmer on the top of the mountain than on the bottom. This made for some AMAZING photos!! We could even see Glacier National Park when we were at the summit! On the way home on the train, we went through Glacier National Park, which was really breath-taking! Go to my portfolio to check out all of my Whitefish photos!

I just got back from California, and the views were absolutely GORGEOUS! We went to Huntington beach and I took some sunrise and sunset photos. The waves were so big, and there were surfers surfing out in the ocean! My favorite photo I took was either the sunset of the beach at Huntington beach or the picture of the wave with the rainbow through it. To check out all of my photos from the trip, visit my portfolio or click here.

I really love this photo, mostly because the surfer is a silhouette against pretty sunsets, and I love the shapes of the waves and how the sun is reflecting right by his feet. This one was also an interesting one to edit, because it was hard getting the details in both the shadows and the highlights. I edited in Lightroom, and the first thing I did was increase the exposure and bring down the highlights, and then bring the shadows up, and then set the white and black points. This made it into a more HDR feel, and then to really make the image pop I also upped the clarity and vibrance. After these changes the image looked pretty good, but the sky was still too bright and the water really didn't pop. So, I used gradient filters to increase contrast and lower exposure in the sky, and then using adjustment brushes to make the color more blue in the water. After sharpening and some noise reduction (and a little bit of a vignette), the image was ready to showcase. Here's the before image at the bottom, and as you can see it lacks the contrast and color that the finished image has.