About Michael D. McCumber Photography
Landscape photography by Michael D. McCumber has been for sale on this web site since 2001. Most of the photographs are from near my home in the Laurel Highlands of Southwestern Pennsylvania, and some of my favorite locations in the rugged mountains of West Virginia. I've also made inroads into Arizona and Maine along with numerous other states in the eastern United States.
My photographs now adorn walls in now thousands of homes across the country, from Maine and Florida in the east to Alaska and California in the west. My works have also been featured in numerous books, magazines, annual reports, web sites, and phone book covers.
Raised in the Laurel Highlands of Southwestern Pennsylvania, I was fortunate with plenty of natural scenery at in some cases only a short walking distance away. My first photographs at a young age were taken of the wild Youghiogheny River winding through Chestnut Ridge southeast of Connellsville.
By the age of 19, I got more serious with my photography after I happened to be in the Laurel Mountains at a stunning peak of autumn there. Ever since that time, October has been a yearly quest to find the best areas of color and to capture as many of the fleeting scenes as time could afford. I could almost identify that exact point in time when this autumn obsession began, as I was driving up Chestnut Ridge and left the lowlands where the trees were largely green the color broke out everywhere and even on a calm blue sky day the leaves were slowly falling from the trees. It was a tremendous autumn where every tree was displaying its best possible show, I would later discover such autumns aren't yearly occurrences and rather probably average once every four or five years.
Nowadays I rarely photograph outside of the magic hours near sunrise and sunset.
Milestones:
- Started selling pictures in 1997 on an old site known as "Fay-West Area Scenes."
- This web site was launched in 2001 starting with photographs from Niagara Falls, and autumn in the Laurel Mountains.
- Went digital in 2006 with a Nikon D200.
- Launched mdmPix.com in 2008 to feature all of my (2006 and on) pictures, not just the chosen few I'd incorporate here.
- Site redesigned in 2010 with the original site (mostly film, but some digital pictures) archived. This redesign puts greater emphasis on the pictures rather than categories of pictures. While mdmPix.com houses over several thousand pictures, from them I'll pick a picture at a time to add to this site with a title and description.