D.C. – here I come!

I am excited to be heading to our nation’s capital tomorrow to photograph the 2017 ISS R&D Conference for CASIS, hosted by CASIS / NASA.

I have never been before and there is a lot of things I am excited to see/photograph!

First, I’ll be arriving Saturday before the conference starts (Monday) so I can get settled and maybe do a bit of photography/tourist-y stuff (Sat/Sun).

Then, the conference. This is what I am most excited for.

This opportunity came about thanks to Reid Wiseman. We brainstormed for a location and hoped for good weather. He invited me to come out to Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base when I was in Houston, Texas in May. Reid even tweeted it out that we were trying when I was setting up and the pressure was on.

After ~50 space station passes – I wasn’t about to fail him then.

Watching @TrevorMahlmann attempt to capture the @Space_Station flyover – the master is on the hunt. pic.twitter.com/wNvuBOzN6k

— Reid Wiseman (@astro_reid) May 2, 2017

We were able to watch/wave to Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer as they flew over the T-38s they train on as NASA astronauts.

About a week later, CASIS reached out to me and asked if I wanted to help photograph the 2017 ISS R&D Conference in Washington D.C.

OK – what!? I had read a press release about a month earlier about the conference.

In it, it noted Elon Musk and Kate Rubins (among many others) would be keynote speakers at the event.

What an opportunity. I had only been pursuing photography full-time for 4 months at the time and an opportunity like this was coming up. Why me? Time to go crush it.

I am so excited to be going to D.C. (for a whole 8 days!) and can’t wait to share the photos I am going to take! Any suggestions of where I should go/what I should see? Let me know!

Let’s go make some framers.