Situational Awareness Situational awareness is the self-defense technique of being aware of what is around you at all times. It is training yourself to recognize potential dangers and threats, find escape routes, and remain safe. Situational awareness is basically seeing and analyzing what is around you. So what does this have to do with photography or this particular photograph? One of my [...]
Looks like Fall, but it's Not! The changing colors of the trees in the fall brings leaf peepers out all over the northeastern U.S. There is nothing like it, or is there? This spring in the New Jersey Pine Barrens we were treated to tree color that was almost equal to the fall. To call this leaf peeping really isn't correct. These [...]
The Blog Post That Isn't a Blog Post Not long ago there was a major wildfire in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Pine Barrens forest fires are part of the ecology so there is do doubt that the Pines will recover, sort of. This wildfire was different. It was big, covering over 13,500 acres in some well travelled areas of the Pine [...]
Photographing the New Jersey Pine Barrens For the last few years I've ended the year with a blog post that looks back on what I've done photographically in order to share some things that I have learned. This year, one major accomplishment happened that doesn't have anything to do with specific photographs. It was the publication of my book called Photographing the [...]
One of those things was to review and organize my older photographs. That lead to the photographs below and the realization that for photographers, our passion, art and creative voice are housed in a small metal box of spinning disks called a hard drive. Only the best of these escape to be printed and framed or placed on a website for the world to see.
Photographing Mist and Fog My friend Ron recently coined a new spelling for mysticism. It's "Mistycism" which describes what misty mornings do to the New Jersey Pine Barrens landscape. It tends to turn that landscape, especially the cedar swamps into a mystical, or "mistycal" world. Here are some examples and a bit of a tutorial on photographing mist and fog. Soft backlit [...]
Every picture tells a story, but which one? Of all the ghost towns in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, Amatol may be the strangest. Hastily built in 1917 during World War I, the town's sole purpose was to staff a munitions factory. At one point Amatol had a population of over 7000 people with churches, a YMCA, speedway, movie theater and more. [...]
Fall in the New Jersey Pine Barrens is always a great, but it was exceptional this year. Landscape photographer Richard Lewis spent 3 weeks out photographing the changing colors of fall in the Pinelands.
As a landscape photographer used to producing clear images, it was challenging to shoot wildflowers with the Lensbaby and not obsess over getting every petal perfectly sharp
If you want to do landscape photography, it's a good idea to look at all the faces the landscape has to offer.
I enjoy hiking and photographing from late afternoon into the evening so headed out to the Franklin Parker Preserve, a favorite spot in the New Jersey Pinelands
Some recent photographs Something about the magic of the New Jersey Pine Barrens keeps calling you back. This wilderness area features a long human and natural history. The result is a landscape whose magic reveals itself to the artist who gets out and explores a bit. That's were I can help by guiding you to some very special places during my one day [...]
Creating a Photography Challenge My wife is a quilter which means I am often accompanying her to quilt shows. By the way, I'm a willing participant because seeing this beautiful fabric art is very inspiring for my photography. One of these quilt shows was held at the historic Kirby's Mill, a restored grist mill, in Medford New Jersey. At this show my inspiration turned out to be not just [...]
For Everyone Else, Creating Something from Nothing I recently had the amazing privilege of leading a group of photographers on my first Pine Barrens Photography Workshop. It was a great experience showing off this special place to both local and not-so-local photographers. When I teach workshops, I am not there to take photographs. Most of the time, I don't even bother to [...]