Dennis Church: I have been passionately engaged with photography since the mid-1970s, discovering photography while living in Madison, Wisconsin. In the 1980s I conducted documentary projects in Iowa and Wisconsin, received several public art grants and exhibited widely. In 2013 I exhibited a one-person show, Florida Moments, seventy-six large-scale color photographs at The Sidney and Berne Davis Art Center in Fort Myers, Florida. In September 2014 I showed a one person exhibit at The Photography Room in Canberra, Australia. I have lived in Bonita Springs, Florida since 2005.

U.S. Route 441 is a north/south highway that runs over 400 mile long from the north border of Georgia down to Miami. For a short section in Central Florida, US 441 becomes Orange Blossom Trail or “The Trail” Though OBT technically runs from Tangerine to Kissimmee, FL most people consider “The Trail” the 7 mile stretch from HWY 50 in the North to Sandlake Road in the South. Lined with pawn shops, strip clubs, sleazy motels, and sketchy bars, The Trail is a hotbed for seedy characters and criminal activity.

Light painting is an artistic photographic technique combining long exposure times with lights in motion. Traditionally these images have been hand-painted with a penlight…but more recently, affordable microcontrollers and addressable RGB LEDs have brought a new high-tech twist to the idea. A few such projects have been featured on tech blogs, most notably the LightScythe by Gavin “The Mechatronics Guy,” which uses an Arduino and a two meter bar of LEDs. The resulting photos, with their intense colors and mid-air suspended images, have been super popular, and rightfully so.

Once in a while, I come across a photograph that’s so beautifully composed and so rich in narrative that I can’t help but say “I wish I took that.” This photograph, by Getty photographer Kevork Djansezian, is such a one.

The whole bittersweet story is right here in this picture. The traffic, the crowds, the billboards, the smog-tinged orange light and the ridiculous palm trees — this can only be Los Angeles. Space Shuttle Endeavour, originally built as a replacement for Challenger, makes its final journey from LAX to the California Science Center.

lays each specimen on color transparency film and, for a more detailed effect, covers it with a diffusion screen. This assemblage is placed on his "easel"—a piece of sheet metal sandwiched between Plexiglas, floating in liquid silicone. Buelteman hits everything with an electric pulse and the electrons do a dance as they leap from the sheet metal, through the silicone and the plant (and hopefully not through him), while heading back out the jumper cables. In that moment, the gas surrounding the subject is ionized, leaving behind ethereal coronas.