When you live in South Jersey and crave hiking and open spaces your only local choice is the New Jersey Pinelands or the Pines as they are locally referred to. The Pines are flat with few vistas and nothing that looks remotely like a mountain. Although it biologically diverse the trees that dominate the area are the scrub and pigmy pines which look rough and scraggly. The area is also crisscrossed by sand roads that don’t usually go anywhere because they are part of some ancient road network to towns that no longer exist. The place has its own charm but I never really had a desire to photograph here until I saw the work of another local photographer named Albert D. Horner.
Albert’s images are beautiful. He creates well-crafted photographs that romanticize the Pines. He inspired me to look again at my local wilderness area and I now carry a camera whenever I hike there. The thing I find interesting is that while we photograph a lot of the same places, I see them totally differently. The environment here can be pretty harsh. What I see in the Pines is this rough, kind of scraggly beauty.
This image is of one of the 4 rivers in the Pines called the Mullica. These rivers are more like narrow creeks but occasionally open up into vast swamps that offer the few expansive vistas out here. This is another photograph assembled from 5 images taken with the Lumix LX5 camera.
Enjoy,
Rich Lewis | www.impressionisticlens.com
Rich…. I think your work is fantastic and a really nice blog. I have created a link on my site…..SJ artists have got to stick together… 🙂
I think its funny how we live in the same area but I did not know your work. I am very familiar with Al’s as we enter most of the same juried shows… great guy. Oh, thanks for the follow and hopefully I can steer some of my peeps your way.
My philosophy…. 1st and foremost… it is the impression of the image, no matter how it was processed….art is art, whether it was a camera,paintbrush or anything in between.
MikeP