We all start somewhere

I first got, what I consider, serious about photography in my early 20’s. I still remember, very clearly, the day my obsession began. My friend Eric signed up for an elective in college for black and white film photography and just picked up his Canon SLR. It was the first time I held a “real” camera. The settings, buttons and symbols were so foreign to me. What in the world was aperture? What is a shutter? For some reason, I just had to know the answers to these questions. I spent the next few hours reading the manual, which honestly NEVER happens to me. What guy reads the instructions for anything? Not me.

As Eric was taking the college class we would go hiking together and take pictures for his various projects. It’s funny to look back on those days because man we did so many things “wrong” or at the very least we didn’t make it easy on ourselves. We would go out at mid day, not a cloud in the sky, to shoot waterfall photos. It didn’t matter to us, we immersed ourselves in being creative no matter what the conditions were. I miss those days.

Photography

I absolutely love photography, especially landscape photography. There is nothing like hiking out to the middle of nowhere and photographing nature. There is honestly something very therapeutic about wandering around in woods. Every time I go out I can just feel all my stress just melt away. Here in Pennsylvania there is no shortage of secluded woods and hidden gems. I’m a fairly introverted person, so having an endless amount of options to seclude myself suites me well. :)

In 2011 my wife Julie convinced me that I should turn my passion for photography into a business. That’s when Ridall Photography was born. We transformed our garage into a photography studio and began shooting portrait, weddings, products, you name it. Along the way we met some awesome people and made even better memories. However, I realized that I was drifting away from what got me started in photography in the first place, landscape photography. In 2019, I started to shift my focus back to landscapes.

YouTube

A few years ago I started a YouTube channel. The channel started off as an experiment. I didn’t have much experience with video but I wanted to show the beautiful places I go. Like I mentioned above, I’m an introvert, so having the camera pointed at me is rather uncomfortable but I’m getting over it. With each trip I began to realize that recording my trips really added much more interest to the actual photos I take. My goal with the channel is to share not only my love for photography but also to inspire people to get out and enjoy nature.