July 4th (First Blog Post)

First Blog Post

Hey everyone, so as you can see this is my first blog post. I'm new to the blogging world and I wouldn't call myself a writer, but I've wanted to start a blog for a while now. At least for now I'm just going to use it as a place to post more of my pictures and some of the stories behind them.

PS, id like to apologize in advance for the many grammatical errors that you're sure to find on here.

The 4th of July

I originally was going to miss my family's annual 4th of July fireworks. For as long as I can remember my immediate family has always taken a week long “camping” trip up to the poconos. I use quotes because we stay on a campsite at Spruce Lake Retreat, a retreat center with a pool and a nice big lodge and most importantly Wifi. It's not what everyone would refer to as camping, but we have fun spending more time outdoors and just relaxing.

For the past three or four years (as far as i can remember) it's been over the 4th of july weekend, so on the evening of the 3rd we would pack a bunch of lawn chairs, blankets and a frisbee and other lawn toys into the car and drive to a golf lodge that isn't too far away. Every year they'd have an amazing firework display over this huge lake and hundreds of people would come and set up chairs on this big hill in front of the lake. 

But this year I had to shoot the opening of a nightclub in Lancaster that night so I wasn't going to be able to make it. Fortunately for me, I guess it was raining pretty hard that evening up in the poconos. The firework display at our usual spot was still going to happen, but nobody in my family wanted to sit out in the wet rain for hours. So they all decided not to go. I guess my dad still isn't giving up on his fireworks, so the evening that I arrived at the campsite, my dad said he'd found this other retreat that was doing fireworks that night. So we packed everything up and left for the fireworks.

As we got closer to what we assumed would be the event, we realized parking was going to be a bit of a challenge. We drove for a solid mile and a half, in some crazy traffic, before we had to turn around to look for some spots that may have opened up. The picture above was in the car while we were on our way back. That line of people extended around another turn so we were getting pretty excited that these must be some good fireworks.

We eventually pulled over in a gravel driveway off the road to try and figure out what to do because we couldn't find any spots along the road. Then this cop car pulls up across the road. We thought he was coming over to tell us to move, but my dad told him were just looking for a spot to park. He proceeded to direct us to a little lot a bit up the road.

We parked the cars, grabbed the chairs, and started walking. We walked for maybe 5 minutes before we came to the entrance to the hill where everyone was sitting

The view was really cool. Up on the hill we could see the hundreds of bots on the water to watch the shot. As the night got later we could see more and more smaller fireworks along the horizon.

Being the genius that I am, I thought that I wouldn't really want my tripod. But as we got to the spot we were going to sit, I realized that I definitely did want my tripod. So started the run back to the car. While i was gone, my girlfriend, Leah took this awesome shot of arianna. 

I ended up getting some pretty cool long exposures. It was a lot of fun taking these.

I hope yall liked my first blog post. Im not sure exactly where I'm going to go with this but I'm probably just going to keep it informal and just fun.

Thanks for reading!