My New England sojourn wasn't limited to photographing some seriously fast cars -- I found enough time to explore around me, in both familiar and unfamiliar places. 

The rogue pebble was hurled into the air by a Mitsubishi. Or maybe it was a Subaru. It whizzed through the air, thoroughly enjoyed its trip courtesy of the laws of physics, and ricocheted squarely off of my cheekbone. If I hadn't felt fully "present" at the 2016 New England Forest Rally until that point, I sure did right then.

Around this time last year, I got a chance to legally wander around the Scranton Lace Company. I walked away with a few neat photos, I suppose! This time around, though, I packed up my Rhino slider and decided to shoot some video. I think it came out pretty alright. 

Seriously, hats off to the Paul Miller team.

Friends and cameras go well together.

No, it's not the Pentagon. It's pretty neat, though.

Wednesday was quite a night -- I tried a beer I've been waiting on for years, I saw some old friends from college, and I enjoyed some fantastic music from Function for Fiction's Brendan "Herb" Campbell. The things that guy can do with a delay pedal is incredible!

A few weeks ago, my eyes skimmed the margins of Facebook and landed on a local Cars and Coffee group link. I joined it, and my tenuous attention span whisked me away, on to the next little crumb of Internet cake. This past Friday, a reminder popped up about an upcoming group meet, which I initially forgot about. I'm officially glad I remembered.

The snow is almost gone now, thanks to New Jersey's perpetual indecision over whether it wants to be Summer, Spring, Fall or Winter. But when it chose to be winter a week ago, it broke the knob off the panel. It was winter as shit. 

There’s a hackneyed phrase in the photography world that buying gear won’t make you more fulfilled as a photographer. By and large, I agree with that. Passion for photography  takes more than a selection of fast lenses and exotic lighting gear. Every now and then, though, a piece of kit comes along that very nearly challenges that adage. The Sigma 35mm is just that – barring some annoying foibles, this lens is nothing short of inspirational. 

So, let's get right to it -- 28 divided by 52 is .5384615. So I ended up completing 54% of my 52 Week Project in the allotted time. Disheartening? Hardly. 

It was a weird Christmas. I'm likely preaching to the choir about this, but it was just about 65 degrees on Christmas day, and the days around it for that matter. In March of last year, I was ecstatic that the snow began to melt and fade away -- now I officially miss it. Nonetheless, I had balmy conditions to test my latest acquisition -- the incredible Nikon 24-70 f2.8 lens. It was a strange Christmas, but a good one! 

Alright, back to ACTUAL photography this time around! I visited my alma mater (man, do I feel old saying that), Fairleigh Dickinson University, for a show put on by the Professors. They're aptly named: many of the band members are, well, professors. I've photographed them before, but this was by far the most extensively-produced show from them that I've seen. As you'll see, the lighting was pretty freaking great.

Towards the beginning of the year, I whipped out the virtual camera within the video game Grand Theft Auto 5. The results were startlingly great, considering I was taking photos inside of a world programmed entirely by game developers. A few weeks ago, I was blown away yet again with the photography mode in an otherwise mediocre racing game: Driveclub.

The first thing to note about being inside a derelict Pennhurst State School building is the silence. Despite a whipping wind outside, the very interior of the two buildings I photographed were thickly quiet, punctuated only by the clicks of distant cameras. It almost felt a little sacrilegious to break the atmosphere, and it was even stranger when a noise surfaced that didn't sound like another explorer.

Sometimes, I start these posts with long-winded exposition before coming to a thesis statement about the week's photos. Not this time.

I FREAKING LOVE SHOOTING CARS WITH THE WESTCOTT ICELIGHT.

Perhaps the most intimidating aspect of the Cold War is how insidious it was. While daily life was largely unchanged throughout the 1940s to the 1990s, the lingering threat of nuclear conflict lured like hissing static (at times, it was significantly more than that). As such, the Cold War gave birth to countless armaments in a show of "mine is bigger" on a global scale, many of which have been simply left to be reclaimed by nature. Case in point: the Nike Missile batteries which are peppered throughout New Jersey, including one only a few towns over from me.

I'm not a people photographer. But I enjoy it. Before I contradict myself any further like a teenager writing lyrics on Tumblr, here's some photographs of people. Specifically, it's me and a friend Scott, a regular in this year's 52 Week Project. And my mother.