I have created a brand-new site for my fine art photography with the focus much more on people interested in viewing and perhaps buying my prints rather than photographers. If you are interested in my work, that is the best site to view as it includes interesting stories about my images as well as the chance to see them at a higher resolution – BackyardImage.com.
Here is a summary of the main stories written to date:
Horseshoe Falls – no, not that one! I recently won a competition on Fine Art America for the best photo taken in Wales and the one I chose was taken at Horseshoe Falls. Just not the one that the Niagara River flows over!
Featured Artist of the Month. Yes, Steve Heap is the Featured Artist at the Morgantown Art Association Gallery in Mountaineer Mall, Morgantown. With 10 images printed and framed, this story explains how he chose the images on display.
The New River Gorge National Park. With its famous bridge with one of the longest single arch spans in the world to the delightful environment, the US’s newest National Park is well worth a visit. In this story, I illustrate the story with some of my favorite images of the park.
Waterfalls of Deckers Creek. The small river known as Decker’s Creek runs down from Masontown to join the Monongahela river in Morgantown, West Virginia. Along the way, there are some beautiful little waterfalls and this story illustrates them in the lovely fall season.
Cucumber Falls in Winter. Cucumber Falls is a really cute little waterfall in the Ohiopyle state park. This park, in the bottom southwest corner of Pennsylvania has set of large river waterfalls, white water kayaking and rafting, and this small waterfall that cascades over a ridge into a bowl carved out of the rocks. I visited it in early March after some cold days and was thrilled to see that I could, first of all, get down to the waterfall and onto the rocks surrounding it, and second, there was some amazing ice shapes formed by the freezing water.
Lake Tahoe Hidden location. I always do a search for good photo locations when I visit an area, and a trip to Lake Tahoe in California was no exception. I read in an interesting blog post that Emerald Bay was a great location and so I decided to try some sunset shots there.
Aiming for Perfection. It is intriguing to ask a professional photographer why they go back to the same place time after time and take (sometimes) a very similar photograph. In my case, I do that, and I also spend quite a lot of time waiting in that place for something! My wife often takes a book with her and, in this case, is able to read her novel in a lovely spot!
Capturing the moon in a photograph. Those images of a scene with a bright, but perfectly clear moon are fantastic, and I have hopefully succeeded with some of my own, but why are many of the images we take unsuccessful? Well, it is to do with two distinct things. The first is that the moon is actually sitting in full sun. It may not seem like it, and it is a long way away, but the reason it shines is that it is the equivalent of daytime where it sits! As a result, our cameras need to set an exposure level that is not too different from what you would set for a photo during the day. Of course, the conditions surrounding us are far from in daylight and so a camera left to its own devices would just average out the light levels, be heavily influenced by the dark sky and surroundings and decide to expose the photo for that. As a result, the sky and surroundings look OK, but the moon is a bright white blob in the sky.
Getting depth into a nature image. A few years ago, my wife and I were walking around a small pond in Northern Virginia when we saw some large plants at the water’s edge with large, palm sized seed pods. Unbeknown to me, these are the pods holding the seeds of the Swamp Milkweed plant and when you open them, like a shellfish, the individually seeds are immaculately laid out in rows ready to catch the wind and blow to a new home to grow! Great, I thought, something to photograph!
Modern Day equivalent of Bird’s Eye Maps. My story about the Bird’s Eye street plans of Morgantown reminded me of my attempt to reproduce the view of Morgantown depicted in Thadeus Morton Fowler’s map. TM Fowler was the most prolific of the cartographers who went around the (mainly) northern states of the US in the late 1800s creating these dynamic, full of energy, maps of the main towns and cities. The local Chambers of Commerce had a big hand in this – they wanted something that could be used to attract new business and so these scenes were always shown with bustling industry, trains racing along tracks, boats plying the rivers and they paid the artists to come and create the engravings. In the end, TM Fowler created 468 of these maps until a fall on an icy street at age 80 ended his life. He tended to spend time in the same area drawing maps of all the major towns and then moving on to the next area, and so Morgantown was in his “West Virginia” period in 1898 and 1899.
Creating mystery with a forest photograph. I enjoy walking through the woods – there is a calmness and a sense of peace and one of my favorite walks is quite a long way away from the snow-covered landscape currently outside my home in West Virginia! That walk is around the Wai Koa plantation on the gorgeous Hawaiian island of Kauai. How I wish I was there now! I guess I will have to rely on my memories (and my photos) to bring back the warmth of that place. The walk itself ends up at a beautiful little garden that has been formed around an old stone dam across the river.
Enhancing maps from the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress contains pretty much every document published in the USA, but increasingly they have been making many of those documents available online via very high-quality scans. When the weather is not conducive to outdoor adventures, I sometimes search around to find things of interest that I can work, improve, and, yes, make available as prints. I’ve written before about restoring the old painting of the B&O train on the Buckhorn Wall in West Virginia, but I’ve also enhanced some maps of my local area as well.
Behind the scenes – a Photographer’s tool-chest. We get used to seeing dramatic images of the landscape and perhaps you wonder how the final image actually comes about? But first, I want to put one misunderstanding to rest – there is no such thing, these days, as an image straight from the camera being the one that should be taken as “how it was on the day.”
Flying a drone – legally. You can fly a drone for pleasure without going to the trouble and expense of taking this exam. But if you want to use the drone commercially in any way – that means if someone gives you a gift for photographing their house, you take a commission from a realtor to help sell a home with some aerial photos, or if you simply want to create and sell prints of local beauty spots, then you do need a license. This is actually a pretty complex piece of learning to be honest – I think I spent a couple of weeks reading first the FAA regulations in this area and then various blogs and sites giving more advanced tuition on subjects to be covered. The ability to read air maps was perhaps the hardest to learn, but it is critical to knowing where you can safely fly in the vicinity of an airport and when you need permission from the local tower to fly your drone. What you learn is when and where you can safely fly a drone and how to manage it (and yourself) to avoid any accidents.
Creating a video of the Cheat Lake story. This is a little different to my normal stories in that it is more of a “how to” explanation of creating a video from still images.
Cheat Lake through the seasons. The area that is now known as Cheat Lake near Morgantown was originally just the Cheat River flowing through its valley until it finally met with the Monongahela River at Point Marion. In fact, a young George Washington surveyed the area back in 1784 and crossed the river where we do today. To meet the growing need for electricity in the area, plans were drawn up for a dam across the river to create what was to be known as Lake Lynn. This was finally finished at the end of 1925 as the lake reached its final height. However, the locals refused to call it by anything other than Cheat Lake although it took 50 years for the name to be officially changed to Cheat Lake in 1976.
Ice and Snow around Cheat Lake. We have lived here by Cheat Lake in Morgantown since 2016 and this is the first time that I think we have seen the lake really freeze over. Cheat Lake is fed by a river and so the water is always on the move, but this January has been cold for day after day and so first we saw the ice start to form in the shallower areas.
Coopers Rock State Forest in West Virginia. They don’t call West Virginia “wild and wonderful” for nothing, and the Coopers Rock state forest outside Morgantown, WV is a prime example of what a wild, untamed land this can be. Although only a few miles away from the busy college town of Morgantown, this drive up the mountains to the rocky overlook, transports you into a different world. The road through the forest to the overlook is magical in its own way with trees overhanging the very well-maintained access.
Restoring an old painting of West Virginia. Way back in 1827, the Baltimore and Ohio Railway was started from the harbor in Baltimore with a plan to run across the Appalachian Mountains to the Ohio river and make Baltimore a major hub for transportation. By 1878 the railway was up and running after some stupendous constructions to get over the mountains of West Virginia and run alongside the rivers in that area to reach its destination.
Valley Falls State Park – a local favorite. Valley Falls is a relatively quiet park about 7 miles south of exit 137 on the I79 near Fairmont, West Virginia. Popular for picnics, walks, weddings (and funerals), it is also just a fantastic spot to just stroll around and watch the water. I’ve seen it at various levels of water – from overpowering torrents of water down the river to much more graceful individual waterfalls. So, what will you see if you visit?
Woodburn Hall – the beating heart of WVU. West Virginia University (or WVU) was founded in 1867 but by 1870, the first campus building in what is now known as Woodburn Circle was completed and (eventually) named Martin Hall. Woodburn Hall itself was completed in 1876 and is now known as the center of that historic and very distinctive set of buildings at the heart of the downtown campus of the college. As a local photographer, I have been trying, over the years, to capture the building in the greatest light and this short article gives you a feeling for what is one of the most distinctive buildings in Morgantown.
Queens Bath on Kauai – beautiful but dangerous. I hesitated to start this post about Queens Bath on Kauai as I know that quite a number of people have been killed in this area of Kauai – swept from the rocks by an unexpected wave and drowned. So I’m not recommending, at all, that you go there, and even if you do go for a look, I wouldn’t go swimming there although I know many do! In this short article, I plan to show you what you will see down there – perhaps the images will be enough for you! I do have this waterfall one on my wall at home as a nice reminder of happy times on Kauai!
The ten places you must visit on Kauai. I’m lucky that I can regularly visit the beautiful Hawaiian island of Kauai and each time I visit, I try to obtain the best photos I can of the island. Kauai is not a very large island – you could drive around it in a day (although you will find the road doesn’t go all the way around!), and so the range of famous landmarks and beauty spots is more limited than you would find on a larger island. But the weather is always changing, the light varies by time of day, and there always seem to be other viewpoints I can take. Here are my top ten locations that you must visit and photograph if you are lucky enough to visit Kauai. Think of it as my top 10 instagrammable spots on an island full of them – Kauai!
What do you see on a Kauai boat cruise? One of the popular activities on the delightful Hawaiian island of Kauai is a boat cruise. Kauai is somewhat unique among many vacation islands in that you cannot drive around the island and, as a result, one corner (often thought of as the most interesting) is out of reach to most visitors. The Na Pali coastline is world famous for its fantastic, fluted mountains but the only real way to see it is by hiking (a two day in and out hike which is only for experts!), from the air, or from the sea.
Many of my best images are available as metal, paper and canvas prints, as well as on many other product types, via Fine Art America. The images below will allow you to select and buy prints to meet your needs.