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.”

There have been two trips that have definitively revolutionized our Juniper Prairie Wilderness project. The first was when we started bringing GPS devices to the woods. The second occurred this weekend.

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.

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.

It was the 4:15 a.m. alarm that finally succeeded in yanking me from the silence. I rolled out of bed and onto my feet.

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.

One of my goals for 2019 is to create a zine about the Juniper Prairie Wilderness area of the Ocala National Forest. In conjunction with this zine, I’m creating a blog series called Contact Sheets, where I post the entire contact sheet for each roll of film I shoot for this project. I spent yesterday developing and scanning three rolls from a recent Juniper Prairie Wilderness trip, so what better day to kick off this project than January 1?