Blog Index

I'm Matt Benson, a Florida-based graphic designer and photographer who enjoys going outside and writing about it. This is where I document those adventures.

Posts tagged the real florida
Breathe

I made a video about being present, Alex and I went camping for the first time since 2019, and Zion turned one year old!

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A Guide to Primitive Camping in Juniper Prairie Wilderness

Everything you need to know to camp in the Juniper Prairie Wilderness area of the Ocala National Forest, including parking information and trailheads, camping locations and helpful resources.

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Moon Flower Blues

We drove to the Juniper Prairie Wilderness Friday evening with the goal of photographing white pond lilies beneath the glow of a rare “blue flower moon.”

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The Woods is a Time Machine

This past weekend I did some time traveling. Not in the science fiction sense, where someone jumps into a DeLorean or a phone booth and leaps forward and backward in a dramatic attempt to rectify some injustice committed in an alternate timeline. No, my time travel was a little more tame than that.

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The Things We Carried

They warn you about the bears. They warn you about the alligators. They warn you about the rattlesnakes and the water moccasins. But they never warn you about the two guys hauling an oversized bathroom mirror miles through the brush and the thicket into the wilderness. Probably best to stay clear of those two.

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Life and Death in The Prairie

I grew up in Florida. My family moved here from Cape Cod when I was seven. But I’ve always seen Florida as an unfortunate circumstance, a stain left in the carpet of my parents’ old dreams. This is the second post of my Contact Sheets series.

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