Goshen, Vermont
On July 13, 2020, The New York Times published Behold Vermont, From Above, a photo essay with text and 17 photos of my Vermont drone photography.
The response was incredible, with a flood of comments, emails, print requests, Instagram followers and messages on Facebook and Linked-In. I am very grateful for this overwhelmingly positive response.
Many photographers and photo editors recommend developing a body of work – a group of photographs focusing on a theme or subject – in order to establish yourself as a photographer. For the past three years, I have been making drone photos around Vermont. I have created a lot of drone photos – more than seven thousand. When I first started using a drone for making photos, my tendency was to fly as high as possible and make sweeping vistas of Vermont landscapes. But as I developed my shooting style, I tended to fly lower and point the camera straight down for a bird’s-eye view of the Vermont landscape. Slowly I started creating photos that were more about abstraction, patterns and color.
After the coronavirus pandemic started and The New York Times suspended their printed Travel Section, they started a series called The World Through a Lens, which featured one photographer and their work each week. As many of us were locked down in our homes and communities, this series provided a visual and virtual way of traveling. In June I sent Phaedra Brown, the Travel Picture Editor, a collection of sixty photos with a proposal to do a Vermont drone photo essay. Fortunately, she said yes. After that she made an edit of 17 of the photos, all with the straight down bird’s-eye perspective. I wrote an essay and Times Editor and Photographer Stephen Hiltner did an great job editing and improving the piece.
Here is the online version:
Weybridge, Vermont
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