Since April 2011, I’ve been working on my documentary of the Florida’s rivers, swamps, and coastlines.  Perfecting the technique took several months, followed up by several months of shooting and traveling throughout the state of Florida, from the Gulf Island National Seashore in the Panhandle to the swamps of Big Cypress in South Florida.  The adventures and obsessive study of light, weather, and water were both exhausting...

Start of My Panhandle Tour For the Summer of 2011, I’ve been hard at work to develop my new ‘Florida 67′ series, canoeing and exploring Florida’s most unique waterways and ecosystems. At the end of June 2011, I spent 4 days in the Florida Panhandle, starting at Dead Lakes, then the St. Joseph Peninsula, onto the Gulf Island National Seashore, and with a quick stop at Torreya State Park on my way back to Orlando....

The Ecosystem of Myakka Myakka, as shown in the photos below, contains a vast assortment of dry prairies.  In the 1840s, American surveys declared the lands worthless, and unworthy of surveying.  Before much of its destruction, the Florida once contained nearly 300,000 acres of prairies.  These precious ecosystems were dug out to control flooding, along with planting of non-native grasses, plants, and trees that wreaked havoc on these...

For the last two years that I’ve lived in Orlando, one park that I has challenged me the most was Blue Springs State Park.  The springs itself is beautiful, surrounded by high mounds put up by Native Americans more than a century ago.  High wood bridge wood walkways provide a long, natural walk through the forest and along the water. But I struggled to get a photo I really loved.  First, the park is almost almost too crowded for...

No Respect for Other Tourists Tourists have officially ruined Luray Caverns with their Cameras.  Over this past Memorial Day Weekend, I flew to visit my brother at his apartment in Arlington, Virginia. As always, I had to visit one photogenic nature area. Normally my style is to find hidden, unknown, overgrown, and unpolished placed to shoot. Since the Florida Caverns are the only dry caves that I’ve explored, I couldn’t...

I. The Dreaded Beach Shot: Traveling through the woodlands throughout Florida over the years, including its swamps, springs, parks and lakes, I have largely ignored one of Florida’s finest and most famous features: its beaches. Maybe I took myself too seriously as an artist to photograph the obvious. Perhaps, though, I’ve been afraid of the challenges of a good Florida beach shot. My cousin Michael – who lived on A1A on...