I generally am completely disinterested in nature shots but......

[The_Traveler]

I generally am completely disinterested in nature shots because most of them are repetitive and the originals are usually better, but there is a consortium of nature photographers from 7 camera clubs in the DC, Northern VA and Md area that has generally interesting meetings and exhibits.
Their traveling show came to my town and so I went to see it and wrote a review.

Review of a traveling exhibit by NatureVisions.org at The Meeting House Gallery, Oakland Mills Interfaith Center Oakland Mills Interfaith Center - The Meeting House daily 8 AM to 9 PM through March 24th, 2014


Being a nature photographer is a double-edged sword. Even though beautiful things swarm around us, virtually everything we can focus our lens on has already been photographed – and probably a million times and probably well. Pick the most arcane subject you can, do an image search and your senses will be flooded by the images that are returned. So what is a photographer to do?

Last month I had the pleasant and enlightening experience of seeing a movie about Joel Sartore, a National Geographic photographer. His pictures were not only just good, they were always great with that extra undefinable something that makes them remain in memory. Not just documents, somehow the pictures encapsulated the essence of the subject and the moment.

So what does the average amateur photographer do to compete with these spectacular – and ubiquitous – images. Well, they work at it, hoping, with creative ideas, skill or even just chance, to catch that lightning in a bottle, that wonderful memorable shot.

So, I went to see the traveling exhibit of NatureVisions, which seems to be the working web-name of the the Mid-Atlantic Photography Association (MAPA), a coalition of volunteers from seven Maryland and Northern Virginia Camera Clubs.

Their mission is:

To promote and advance the appreciation of photography in the Mid-Atlantic region and elsewhere, encourage the participation in photography by individuals with all levels of experience and all areas of photographic experience and all areas of photographic interest, and increase the appreciation of photographic art within our community.​

The organization has a big yearly event, the Nature Visions Photo Expo and that will be November 14-16, 2014 at Hylton Performing Arts Center, Manassas, Virginia.


So I went to see their traveling exhibit of twenty-five images at the Meeting House Gallery in Oakland Mills, Columbia . This traveling exhibit is made up of the very best of the nearly 800 images entered in the expo by the members of the seven camera clubs that contribute to the event.

And they were pretty damn nice.

Of course, as one would expect, most were technically well done, well focused, usually well-printed and even often well composed. Some of them were, in my opinion, equal quality to those seen in National Geographic. There are the inevitable things-I've-seen-before-by-different-people and I-was-there-with-a-good-lens-and-took-this-unexceptional-picture but this is the problem with nature pictures, everybody is out there shooting. In toto, the show is good and well worth the trip over to Oakland Mills.

The remainder of this review contains copyrighted images of others and can be read on my blog site at review--naturevisions-traveling-exhibit