Albert Lew developed his passion for photography after visiting Monhegan Island in Maine for the first time in 2013. He was especially drawn to photographing the sun rising out of the ocean. One day while setting up his camera on a tripod, Albert forgot to lock the tripod head’s panning adjustment down, resulting in a blurred photograph. Although he considered it a mistake at the time, after spending more time with photo, Albert discovered an affinity with the effect he created. The resulting blur impressed upon him a new way of “experiencing” sunrises as it held more visual interest than a more traditional photo would have. This technique is known as Intentional Camera Motion, or ICM, where the photographer intentionally moves the camera across a scene, mashing together several moments in time.

Albert has developed a passion for the narrative potential of ICM landscapes and their ability to simultaneously present a visually arresting image, while encouraging the viewer to begin reconstructing the scene in their imagination. Albert includes a variety of traditional landscape components in his ICM images, such as mountains, water, clouds, fog and the sun. In all but one of the images, he aims to increase the ambiguity of these components’ contribution to the images by using a telephoto lens, which presents viewer with a narrow perspective into a specific sliver of the landscape. In the end, however, Albert merely wants to share with the viewer the amazing palette of light and color nature presents to each of us every day.