Taking a Break from Photography with Photography Many professional photographers use personal projects to keep their love of photography and their creative voice alive. Personal projects allow you to do what you want instead of what a client needs. When I retired from commercial photography a few years ago I thought my work would be nothing but personal projects. While it is [...]
Exploring Over 1,000,000 acres My last blog post was about fall mist in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, but the 2020 fall season had a lot more to it then a few misty mornings. It's been a busy one. Pandemic restrictions lifted enough to so I could start holding small photography workshops. My webinar on photographing the New Jersey Pine Barrens for [...]
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. [...]
The Judges Shack Revisited New Jersey excels at many things including great places to photograph a moonrise and quirky little gems of history. Those two things came together on a cold winter night along the windswept New Jersey shoreline of Island Beach State Park. The Judge's Shack, located in the park, is always interesting to photograph. When the January Super Moon rose [...]
Why We Photograph What We Photograph This photograph is part of a series about the ruins of an 18th century stone house. It was a bit of a surprise to find this building during a hike, especially one made of stone where this home is located. I thought it may be a good idea to discuss how I made the image. Vision It is important to have intent in your art. The method [...]
We all can use some serenity, right? When color landscape photography is posted on social media, it is the colorful, over-saturated and dramatically composed images that seem to rack up the likes. Here is an interesting fact. Scientific studies show that while images, photographic or otherwise, with intense color catch the attention immediately, they tend to not be remembered in the long term. I'm [...]
What happens to a seaside paradise when the seaside gets toxic The story of Bombay Beach, California is an unusual one. In the early 1900's an attempt to control the Colorado River for irrigation backfired when flood waters filled the Salton Basin creating the Salton Sea. This new sea in the desert may have been an environmental disaster, but was and still is the largest lake in [...]
The remains of a South Jersey Farm Abandoned Farm House by Richard Lewis 2016 I noticed this old abandoned farm house by accident while driving. I just happened to glance at the side of the road and saw it at the end of a long and very overgrown driveway. The house is a typical early to mid 19th century South Jersey [...]
The Old Mills and Landscape of Southern Missouri When I signed up for Craig McCord's photography workshop in the Ozark Mountains, he probably thought I made a mistake. Why would a guy from New Jersey go to southern Missouri to take pictures? Shouldn't I be going to the Grand Canyon, the Grand Tetons or some other place with grand in its name for great photography? Well, I [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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.
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