I had long heard of this place in Northern NJ, Long Pond Ironworks State Park and had to visit. I got up a 4:30am last fall 2025 and trucked up there about 50 miles north of me and found the place in the dark. Next time I’ll go a tiny bit earlier. I bumbled my way down the water’s edge along a trail only about 50 yards from the parking lot and set up to wait for the light to change. After about 10-15 minutes I hear someone and another photographer walks down and we chat for a few minutes. […]

The classic way to use a Half Frame camera is to take 2 or more photos right after each other and print them all at one time, including the sprockets and the surround frame numbers onto one sheet of paper. I don’t use a darkroom any longer, so I do the same thing digitally. These photos are with my trusty Canon Demi EE17 camera. It’s been CLA’d (Clean Lubricate Adjust). It is a manual + auto-exposure half frame camera from the mid-1960’s. Lovely, mostly metal construction. I got mine from Ebay and then paid for the CLA. Before I sent

The more that I find puddles and their reflections, the more that I like them. They are so transient and so dependent on specific conditions to get a decent image that this subject presents both a challenge and an opportunity. I find that the vignette that the puddle reflection provides is a window to a vantage point not usually seen. I’ve got a bunch of good photos, as shown below. This is easily a theme where I could find 10-20 photos that would look good in a solo exhibit or as an ongoing project These four from a random CT

Walk around, look, think. Photos will present themselves, in my experience. This set of photos was just inside an open air stairwell that went down to some sort of exhibition hall at Princeton University in NJ. They were the most mundane of subjects, stairwell lights. The stripes resulting from water raining down and dripping down the stone was lovely. And the lights, with their yellow colors contrasted with the blue-gray color of the light shrouds. There were options as well to include the railings, which provided a nice offset to the lights. PBWA – Photography by Walking Around. IT WORKS!

Abstracts, or at lest abstract-oriented photos, are always appealing to photographers who aspire to be artists. Those of us who are incompetent at a physical art form like painting or drawing see photography as a way to find appealing, sensuous images. For me, i have always loved to find lovely images from otherwise mundane objects and scenes. While the allure of the National Park “STAND HERE FOR BEST PHOTO” way of making photos appeals to many, it’s not me. These two images show what you can find if you just look up. They are of the support beams for a