Gravelly Point Fall Family Portraits

The expansive greenery and waterfront at Gravelly Point in Arlington, Virginia, provides a picturesque backdrop for portrait photography with its stunning views of the iconic Washington, D.C., skyline.  The proximity to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport adds a unique and dynamic element to the shots, capturing the energy and movement of planes taking off and landing against the cityscape.

Take a moment to enjoy some recent family portraits I captured this past fall for this family’s Christmas cards, and a small set of senior portraits for their graduating avgeek soon heading off to college.

T. F. Green Airport

Foreward in 2021

These photos in this post are from 2018; long before SARS-CoV-2 was a concern or worldwide problem.

As with the photos I recently posted from my 2017 trip to Rhode Island, the following is a collection of photos shot in 2018 which I’ve had in my personal backlog to edit and write about for several years.  I only recently finished editing and composing this post alongside others from the same trip due to the sheer volume of images.

T. F. Green Airport

In 2018, I went on a roadtrip to visit with my friend Alyssa and explore more of her home state of Rhode Island.  Normally I’d fly, but due to variable timing it made more sense to drive, and it allowed me more freedom to change plans on the fly.  As it would happen, my chance meeting with a firefighter based at T. F. Green Airport would benefit from this flexibility.

Early in my trip, after a morning of exploring downtown Woonsocket and introducing me to some Rhode Island staple cuisine, I spotted an antique fire truck parked in front of a fire station while driving back to Alyssa’s; I had to stop and get some photos.  While checking it out, the owner came out of the fire station; turns out this fire truck is privately owned - it’s not owned by the fire department.  The owner is a firefighter who bought and restored the 1972 Maxim F ladder truck, which is an especially unusual sight today with its open cab.  In talking with the owner, it turns out he is stationed at T. F. Green Airport (PVD), so we had lots of aviation stuff to talk about.  As it became clear we could easily kill half a day chatting, we traded contact information and talked over the next few days.

During my chance meeting the firefighter, we’d discussed my connections to IAD and DCA, such as my multimedia roles, and interfacing with the airport police and fire departments for various projects.  Since then, we’d arranged time to meet up once again, while he was on-duty at PVD’s airfield rescue and firefighting station so he could give me a proper airfield tour from airside.  I love airports, and I love airport people!

I arrived at the ARFF station and met up with my new firefighter friend who was very eager to see me again.  Unfortunately part of our plan fell through, because due to other duties going on that day he was left without a service vehicle (beyond an ARFF truck, which you can’t exactly take out without a full crew in case there’s a call).  But no biggie; we still hung out airside for a few hours trading stories and watching aircraft taxi and take off.

T. F. Green’s airfield is interesting because its ATC tower and ARFF station are located on the opposite side of the passenger terminals; this is common (and normally necessitated by response time requirements) for ARFF stations, but although not unheard of for ATC, less common.  This location opposite the passenger terminals gave a much wider, different perspective of the airfield than one would normally get while simply catching their flight.

At mid-day, this was a slow time between banks, when most aircraft were in the sky between destinations; this was on purpose so the likelihood of a call was lowest.  Just after I arrived, one of the New England Patriots’ private aircraft landed after performing practice maneuvers in preparation for an upcoming aerial display; you can see it taxiing back to its hardstand.

Rhode Island: Summer 2017

Foreward in 2021

This is a blog post and collection of photos from my first-ever visit to Rhode Island that I’ve had in my personal backlog to edit and write about for several years; the photos have been done and waiting to be posted for almost three years, and I even completed the entire photo layout design and part of the copy on a flight two years ago… since then, it’s all just been sitting, sadly collecting dust.

The reason this happened is for several reasons; I put all personal work on the backburner until paid work is done, and by time these photos were done being edited, I had already gone back to Rhode Island to visit Alyssa once again, with an even larger batch of photos to edit, post, and blog about. The intention was to get those photos done as well, and post both blogs and photosets back-to-back.

Well, that’s essentially what’s happening now - I just recently, two solid years later, finished editing the last of my Rhode Island photos from 2018 (it was a much larger, more daunting set - I might be breaking it into multiple blog posts - you’ll why see, in time), and now I’m circling back to compose posts, and do what I should have done years ago, but sticking with the original plan of posting both sets at the same time.

Most of this post was composed in 2020; you’ll see the time of writing denoted in the post itself to account for any changes in context or subject matter resulting from the time passed.

So, it’s 2021, but these photos are all from 2017, long before COVID-19 was ever a worry.  And this 2017 trip had long-term impacts on me that still affect me to this day, so perhaps it’s good I’m writing about it so much later (read about it below).

So, after many years of anticipation, here is my 2017 trip to Rhode Island, which includes airports, islands, scooters, and boats.

DCA - PVD

NOTE: Everything from this point until denoted below was written in 2018.

For the last several years, Alyssa has come down from Rhode Island to visit with me, typically during my birthday week, but the opportunity to visit her hadn’t conveniently presented itself until this year - naturally I chose her birthday week, since it was becoming an unofficial tradition.

The last time I flew out of DCA the A Concourse was strictly JetBlue, which should tell you how many years it had been since I flew out of DCA.  Now it is exclusively Southwest; this would by my first trip on WN.  I’d always heard Southwest is either love / hate, so I wanted to try it for myself.  Anytime I fly I like to arrive early enough to grab a meal, a coffee, and catch up on emails in a relaxed timeframe.  It just happened that my travel date unfortunately had some of the worst weather the East coast had seen that Summer.  A severe thunderstorm spanning the entire length of the coast was rolling through the region, causing ground-stops at multiple airports including DCA.  My flight out was delayed by over 4 hours.  Not a big deal given how good Page’s (DCA Concourse A) food is.

Once the storm had finally passed through, flights boarded and began departing normally again.

Upon entering PVD’s airspace, I could see during our approach they were doing some night work on one of their runways.  I ended up getting a pretty good nighttime aerial view of T. F. Green International Airport because this also turned out to be my first go-around flight.  Our aircraft had to go-around when a departing flight on our arrival runway failed to depart when cleared.  This added about 5min to our flight time to climb back to altitude while turning sharply, and rejoin the approach pattern.

It made for a long and interesting day of travel.

Newport Winery

NOTE: Everything from this point forward was written in 2020, despite being photographed in 2017.

Alyssa had taken the entire week off for birthday festivities, and although we didn’t have a plan for every single day I’d be in town, we did have some plans in mind.

First up was wine tasting in Newport; anytime Alyssa comes to DC I take her to a new winery, since we have a lot of them.  Now it was her turn, and she chose Rhode Island’s largest vineyard which is also widely regarded as its most elegant.  I found it very similar to Virginia’s Stone Tower Winery, which is about as near to a Napa Valley vineyard you can get without leaving the DC region.

We had booked a reservation for a winery tour, to learn about the vineyard’s history, see its winemaking operations, and taste a selection of the 32 wines Newport Winery makes.

You’ll also notice in all photos of me that I’m wearing a knee brace - this trip was three months after my patellar dislocation, and two months before undergoing MPFL Reconstruction surgery, so the knee brace was there to help prevent another excruciating dislocation, and provide at least some stability until I got my knee fixed.  I’m happy to report, today, that my surgery was totally successful, and after a 6 month recovery, I’ve now been running half-marathon distances problem-free and in respectable times for two years, an endurance milestone I had never reached before the initial injury.

A fog rolled in while we were outside enjoying glasses of wine we’d ordered after the tour and two rounds of tastings; beside the people I hold dear in Rhode Island, the coastal fog is possibly my favorite thing about the Ocean State.

Block Island

The next day, Alyssa’s family had planned out an overnight trip to Block Island to celebrate her birthday on the beach.  I didn’t know what Block Island was except for “it’s like Martha’s Vineyard, but smaller;” having never been to Martha’s Vineyard, that description didn’t help me one bit.

Just after sunrise, we headed to Galilee, Narragansett to catch the high-speed ferry to Block Island; about a 30min ride on a hot rod boat with 4 engines and 4,400 horsepower.  Unbeknownst and unfortunately for everyone, the ocean offshore had become very choppy, with waves in excess of 10 feet, which for a cruise ship is jostling but fine, but for a 99ft catamaran, it’s a bucking bronco.  I’ve only felt motionsickness twice in my life, and this was one of those times; somehow, unlike most passengers aboard, I somehow managed to not vomit.  The ride was so rough you had to hold onto your seat to keep from being lifted from it, and anything not sitting on the floor at the start of the journey had been thrown to it by time we reached the island.  Even the crew was caught by surprise how much it picked up since their last run an hour earlier.  The few pictures I have while on the water are from by the shore when it was stable enough to stand - my stomach was still spinning an hour after disembarking.

We’d originally planned on eating upon arrival, but that was out of the question for obvious reasons.  Instead we decompressed on the beach for a little, and then head into town to pick up scooters Alyssa had reserved once the ground didn’t feel like it was spinning anymore.

So here’s the part that still affects me to this day.  Each of us driving a scooter had to demonstrate competency driving the scooter before being allowed to take off on one.  Alyssa… was given a hesitant pass after her wobbly solo demonstration; we were sharing a scooter, and the staffer said, “ehhh, why don’t you let him drive you around as a passenger on it for a while first.”  So off we went, Alyssa riding along behind me as our pack of 3 scooters explored the island’s twisting, foggy roads.  After a while of riding, stopping here and there to check out views of the cliffs and shoreline, Alyssa decided it was her turn; “it’s my birthday, it’s my turn!”  So after reminding her how to start the thing (which should have been red flag number two), I hopped on back behind her, grabbing onto the bar very firmly, as I was scared of somehow reinjuring my knee.  Alyssa gave the scooter some gas to creep up the shoulder to the road, but gave it a too much, lurching the scooter forward.  She panicked and mixed up the throttle and the brake, pinning the gas; I yelled “ALYSSA,” but it was too late - I got thrown off the back, landing on my tailbone and crashing my head on the ground, and she launched herself and the scooter into a ditch dense with bushes.

The helmet did its job and I didn’t feel a thing up top - I laid on my back for a few minutes gathering my self from the shock and the wind that was knocked out of me, though my tailbone was sore for weeks afterward.  What wasn’t evident until much later was what happened to my neck.  Several weeks after this incident, once back home, I started experiencing an ongoing pinched nerve down my left arm; it kept happening - it would slightly improve, then overnight blow up again.  This started in the week before my knee surgery, so I wasn’t allowed to take anything for it, and I wasn’t about to delay the surgery any longer.  I successfully had my knee surgery and made a full recovery, but this problem kept getting worse and worse while rehabbing post-op.

Without going into an even lengthier amount of detail, this incident created a recurring slipped disc and subsequent trigger points for the last 3 years since it has happened, and landed me in physical therapy twice now.  The slipped disc seems to be healed, and it’s been a slow battle against chronic trigger points for about a year now.  I have a really good PT, and the goal is to get my neck and shoulder totally under control so it doesn’t keep spiraling into severely seized muscle spasm; we’re pretty close as of this writing.

I don’t blame Alyssa one bit; it was an accident, and I didn’t even tell her the cause of my shoulder pains until she was in town two months ago as of this writing - she’s one of my best friends, and I knew she’d have felt too guilty until now.

So, I got knocked off a scooter, Alyssa launched herself into some bushes, and her birthday wasn’t really off to a good start.  Oh, and now the scooter wouldn’t start once her family dug it out of the bushes - we think it was just oil pressure or something from being flipped over, because after letting it sit upright for about 10min it finally started back up.  Once it was clear I was okay, everyone, especially Alyssa, agreed she wasn’t driving it at all, and I’d drive it the rest of the day.  The small crowd of concerned onlookers that had gathered dispersed when Alyssa and I hopped on and slowly got back on the road - I drove us probably not even a mile, just regathering my bearings, and then we stopped to check out a lighthouse.  But first, we got a picture of Alyssa with the scooter since it’s what she’d been looking forward to all week - if you look closely, there is actually blood on the side of it from where she scraped her ankle.

I told Alyssa she wasn’t supposed to take “you’re a pain in the ass” so literally as we gingerly walked to the foggy lighthouse; my tailbone throbbing, her ankles skinned.

Interestingly, there was a September 11th memorial bench nearby the lighthouse; one of two 9/11 memorials on the island.  There is no information about the memorial on the island beyond the memorial’s own engraving, but this bench is dedicated to Catherine Carmen Gorayeb who moved from Boston to New York and perished in the World Trade Center collapse where she worked.

At this point, our group of six broke off our own directions in pairs.  Alyssa and I’s next stop was nearby Mohegan Bluffs to stretch our legs a bit, although we didn’t hike all the way down to the beach; the rough surf we’d endured to arrive on the island was starting to roll in, and we had reserved a beachfront spot on a calmer, more protected section of shore on the other side of the island - later.

One more stop with the scooter; I found out Block Island has a small airport, Block Island State Airport (BID), and I wanted to check it out.  It’s a GA airport, but does have some commercial aviation.  It had been, quite clearly, a VERY long morning, and our stomachs were finally stable and starving, so it was time to return the scooter and grab some lunch.  I never turn down a lobstah roll, so naturally:

While we were eating, some bikers parked their choppers out front.

It had been a long morning, and we still hadn’t done anything on the beach yet.  It was time for a drink… or a few.  This was my first time drinking from a fruit, and just relaxing with a drink(s) on the beach!  Not many pictures of the beach since we kept the pineapple Long Islands flowing and went swimming a few times with the cameras safe from the sand.

It was getting late, and we weren’t staying on the island, so it was time to catch the ferry back - no high-speed ferry amplifying the surf this time; hell no.  Even-though the morning’s high-speed experience was an outlier according to everyone (including the crew, and Alyssa and her family who all go to Block Island several times a year), we weren’t in any mood for that chance again, so we took the much larger, regular speed ferry back to Narragansett.  Not a good sign: we spotted vomit on the deck when we boarded, but the 1 hour ride back was just fine.

There’s little reason I would have known about the project on my own, but the return trip gave a fantastic view of the Block Island Wind Farm; a five turbine offshore wind-farm that serves as a demonstration of oceanic wind power generation, and became the first commercial off-shore wind farm in the United States when it became operational in 2016.

Neither Alyssa nor I made the hotel reservation, but we stayed at the diviest hotel I’ve ever been to in my life.  I only have a photo of the parking lot, which had a small (read: Hitchcock-esque) seagull problem mirroring the rest of the motel.

The room keys were punch-hole keycards which I don’t remember ever seeing except maybe once as a young child in the early 90s.  The faded room number was Sharpied onto the card, indicating the motel reused the easily duplicated keycards.

This motel permanently shut down a few months after our stay.  Like most beach hotels, we used it as a place to wash the sand off and crash after spending all day out, but still, wow.

Everyone got back together at night to get some Rhode Island specialties for Alyssa’s birthday dinner: Rhode Island clam chowdah, clam cakes, and fried whole-belly clams.  New England hands-down has the best seafood; Maine is for lobster - go to Rhode Island for clam (I also got raw oysters; yay!).

Afterwards, some of us went barhopping until the wee-hours of the morning and every bar in Galilee closed down.

Narraganset

The next morning Alyssa and I had a lazy, no-plan day exploring Narraganset, stopping by Point Judith Lighthouse and the rocky shoreline.

Of course, lunchtime came around, and I never turn down a lobstah roll; I got another helping of Rhode Island clam chowder too.  Monahan's Clam Shack happens to be rated the second-best lobster roll in the Ocean State by Buzzfeed, and makes their Top 25 list in the country.

Stopping by Sunset Farms’ farmer’s market, we said hi to their goats and gave some love to the owners’ elderly Irish Wolfhound sheepdog (who has sadly since passed away).

While there, I happened to catch a rare car spot.  At under 100 examples ever produced, I caught the WaterCar Panther as it pulled in to load up - I *think* it was the farm’s owner’s(?).  This amphibious Jeep conversion is WaterCar’s more practical successor to its Corvette-powered Python, capable of launching itself and reaching speeds of 85mph on land and 45mph on water.

PVD - DCA

The next morning, this trip was at an end on a cool, drizzly morning that lended for some aerial views of the bays and rivers that only appeared as inky-black splotches beneath the low cloud cover on my nighttime flight into PVD.

Stay tuned several more posts including photos from my 2018 trip to Rhode Island.  My stay in 2018 was longer and more involved, and really makes most logical sense broken into separate posts given some of the places I went and things I did.

DCA Planespotting - May 16th, 2019

Last week after a photoshoot at DCA, I dropped by Gravelly Point for a few minutes since I was feeling up to it (I am recovering from a shoulder injury). I didn’t stay long, but couldn’t resist the beautiful weather. I snapped some photos, but really wanted to try the EOS R shooting 4K through a 400mm lens, which equates to 700mm with the EOS R’s 4K crop. In short, 700mm handheld makes for great photos, but is really hard for video (duh).

Alitalia at IAD

Washington Dulles International Airport - Leonardo da Vinci–Fiumicino Airport

This past Thursday, May 2nd, 2019, Washington Dulles International Airport welcomed Alitalia’s A330-200, formally beginning non-stop service to Rome. Fabio Lazzerini, Alitalia CBO, and Armando Varricchio, Italy’s ambassador to the United States, spoke to guests and passengers at the gate preceding a ribbon cutting ceremony to officially mark the beginning of service from IAD to FCO.

Embassy of Italy

Later in the evening, guests within the aviation and Italian / United States economic and cultural fields gathered at the Embassy of Italy in Washington, DC to celebrate the new link formed by Alitalia’s newly launched flight service. Guests enjoyed a fashion show featuring every Alitalia cabin crew uniform since the airline’s inception in 1946 while sampling Italian dishes and cocktails.

And here I am!

Huge thank you to Ryan Ewing of AirlineGeeks.com for capturing me in my element.