An aimless pursuit of beauty. What do you do when a day of scouting for photography locations doesn't yield anything? That happened recently on a trip to the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. We spent the afternoon hiking the Cliff and other trails to check out overlooks and waterfalls. My plan was to find the best ones and spend the next few [...]
Being on the top of that mountain taught me to experience sunrises and sunsets in a different way. I've always looked for that decisive moment when the light is at it's peak. Now I realize that a sunrise is a story that starts at first light and ends when the dawn colors fade.
I'm not sure why I went back to the old Pennhurst Hospital which is often referred to as the "Shame of Pennsylvania." The hospital for "feeble-minded children" (from its original name) was built in 1908 and had a long history of being overcrowded, underfunded and understaffed which lead to abuse and neglect of the young residents until it was closed in the 1980's. [...]
Happy 100th Anniversary to the National Parks The US National Park system may be the best thing our government has ever done. Preserving some of our best American landscapes has been going on for a hundred years. In spite of some parks being overcrowded with visitors, having an overworked National Park Service staff, and many other challenges, the beautiful landscapes remain relatively unchanged [...]
Why wake up at 4am to hike up a mountain? One of the things I love about being a photographer, and a hiker, is the challenge to find unique places to experience nature at its best. In Virginia's Shenandoah National Park that meant hiking up a mountain in the dark before the sun came up. On a beautiful afternoon my wife and I hiked [...]
If this post doesn't make you cry I'm not doing my job Yellow Dog Village is an odd name for a town, but it is sort of an odd town. In the early 20th century when miners and mine owners battled each other over wages and working conditions, this town was a place of harmony between workers and management. Yellow Dog Village [...]
Batsto Village is a preserved historic iron works in the middle of the New Jersey Pinelands. In the 18th and early 19th centuries it was a major industry and even played an important roll in the American Revolution. I wanted to photograph a moonrise at Batsto Village, but right after arriving it became obvious that it wasn't going to work out. There were just too [...]
Abandoned homes are always the saddest of all because they were places where people and families lived. Every square inch of this place has a memory created by occupants of a home that is over 100 years old.
Fun at the Berks County Photographic Conference I just returned home from my first time presenting at the Berks County Photographic Conference in Kutztown, Pennsylvania which was an awesome experience on many levels. It is always great to be able to share one's knowledge and experience with like-minded individuals. My presentations were on photographing abandoned buildings and iPhoneography. Also rewarding was getting to hear the [...]
Hiking the New Jersey Pinelands for Therapy and Art I had a knee injury from a bicycle accident a few months ago and have been walking as part of a physical therapy program. On a recent Saturday afternoon, I decided to do some therapy by hiking in the Franklin Parker Preserve, one of my favorite New Jersey Pinelands spots. It ended up being more of a spiritual [...]
Visually Preserving an Un-preservable Local Treasure I had posted photographs from this mansion earlier and was going to make it a series with several parts, Instead, I'm creating a new post with more information and photography. The McNeal mansion was built around 1894 in Burlington, New Jersey as the dream house of a local industrialist named Andrew McNeal. It sits along the Delaware [...]
Three out of four isn't bad, right? We all have our favorite places and this is one of mine. I pass this old barn almost every day and its elegant, simple utilitarian architecture calls to me. Recently, I photographed the barn in the early Spring and realized that I now have images of it in three of the four seasons. Summer is absent because the barn [...]
Neighborhood Nukes in South Jersey In the rural Southern New Jersey community of Woolwich Township are the remains of another cold war relic, Nike Missile Battery PH-58. Unlike the Lumberton site, PH-23/25 from my previous post, when this site was decommissioned in 1974, it remained abandoned and was never repurposed. Now it stands as a dilapidated, overgrown memory of a time when [...]
A Sad History That Goes From Glory To Gory. I have revised this blog post to provide more detail and photography, please click here to see it. All of the photographs that were in this post are now on the new one. Doorway to Devastation by Richard Lewis 2016
Nike missiles go viral (sort of) My blog post about the former Nike missile site in Lumberton New Jersey received an overwhelming response. Not only did this post receive as much traffic in a few days as my blog gets in an entire year, the people who are contacting me about it are different than my usual blog followers. In addition to the [...]
Through the overgrown property I saw the remains of a stylish 1960’s building with a repeating decorative concrete arched roofline. It’s a bit strange to see a relatively new building in such terrible shape.