Anglican church, Portland · July 2026
First Photon — Issue #002
July 21, 2026
A short note before we start.
Last week I called this a letter about landscape photography in Jamaica. That's true, but it's not the full frame. Between Issue #001 and today, I spent time with the actual work — the frames I'm making, the places I keep going back to, the reason I pick up the camera at 4am. And I realized I'd described a smaller version of the practice than the one I'm actually building.
Here's the honest version: I'm a documentary photographer making a long-term visual record of the Jamaica that's disappearing — the great houses, the fishing villages, the old churches, the coastlines that won't look the same in twenty years. I also teach the craft, because the craft is how the record gets made, and because most photographers I know want to learn it from someone actually doing the work.
The letter still has four pillars, still lands every Tuesday, still costs nothing. One pillar's name changed. Everything else in the pact from Issue #001 holds — real numbers, the misses, the work shown plainly, and a finish line you can watch move. If anything, the pivot makes the pact easier to keep, because the practice is clearer now than it was seven days ago.
More on that inside. On with the letter.
🌴 Island Frame — Portland's forgotten sunrise
There's a stretch of the Portland coast between Boston Bay and Long Bay where nobody photographs the sunrise, and I don't understand why. Every landscape photographer I know who visits Jamaica goes to Frenchman's Cove for the postcard, to Blue Lagoon for the color, to Reach Falls for the drama. All good calls. But the coast between Boston and Long, especially the mile just past Boston Jerk Centre where the road bends inland and you can walk out onto the black rocks — that's where the light does something I haven't seen elsewhere on the island.
Here's what I mean. The east-facing rocks catch the first sun a full ten minutes before the beach itself does, because they're elevated. If you're standing on the sand waiting for sunrise, you miss the first frame — the one where the water is still slate and the rocks are already gold. You have to be on the rocks themselves, facing back at the coast, letting the sun rise behind you and light the cliff face. Nobody does this. Every guide book and every Instagram tag points people to the beach.
The window is short. About four minutes of usable light before the sun is fully up and the whole scene flattens. Get there by 5:15 am for a 5:35 sunrise this time of year. Park just past the jerk centre on the left shoulder — it's a wide dirt pullout, safe overnight, safe pre-dawn. Walk the fisherman's path down to the rocks. Long lens is better than wide here; the frame is a study in one section of cliff, not a panorama.
I'll write the full Island Frame guide for this stretch next week, with the map and the frames I've kept. This is the preview.
🕌 Field Notes — the church at Buff Bay
Here's the pillar that's new. Field Notes is the thread I'm adding this week — a dispatch from the archive I'm building of the Jamaica that won't survive twenty more years. Where The Journey used to live in this slot, that thread now runs at the bottom of every issue as the honest update on the practice. Field Notes is the actual documentary work.
This week I drove out to Buff Bay to photograph the old Anglican church. If you've driven the north coast between Portland and St. Mary, you've passed it — sitting just off the main road, red roof, weathered brick, a steeple that leans about two degrees off vertical. It's been there since 1848. It won't be there in 2050. The congregation has shrunk to a few dozen. The roof needs work the parish can't afford. Every hurricane season is a lottery.
I spent an hour there Sunday morning, before service. The light was flat and hazy — not the frame I hoped for, but the right frame for what this actually is. This is not a beautiful-Jamaica photograph. It's a document. I photographed the whole exterior, the east and west faces, the leaning steeple against a blank sky, the graves running down the slope behind. Then I went inside and shot the interior after service, with the priest's permission. Wooden pews, a leaking ceiling patch, a hymn board still showing Sunday's numbers.
The full essay on Buff Bay will go up in Old Jamaica in the coming weeks. It'll include the priest's own words about what the building means to a community that's watched it fade for two generations. That's what Field Notes is — the fragment that becomes the essay. Not the finished piece, but the trace of the work being done.
If you know a place in Jamaica that's disappearing and deserves the record, reply and tell me. Buildings, communities, trades, ways of doing. I can't photograph everything, but I want to know what I'm missing.
🎨 In The Edit — the two-slider fix for tropical greens
Quick one this week, because the field time ate the desk time. Tropical greens in Lightroom default to a neon-cast that looks nothing like what you saw in the field. It's a rendering problem in how Adobe interprets the Bayer filter for saturated green wavelengths. The fix is two sliders, HSL panel, ten seconds per edit.
Pull the green saturation down about eight to twelve points. Then push the green luminance up about six to ten points. That's it. What this does: it desaturates the neon cast and lifts the value so the green reads as lush instead of acid. Same math works on the yellow channel if the greens are leaning warm.
You lose nothing. Your foliage still looks green — greener than the raw file, actually, because your eye reads the higher luminance as more saturated even when the actual saturation is lower. This is one of maybe three moves I make on every Jamaica frame, and it's the most reliable.
Try it on a Blue Mountain frame or anything with heavy foliage. Send me before-and-afters if you experiment.
Let's go chase some light.
— Kevin
Portland, Jamaica · July 21, 2026
The Journey · Where the practice stands
This month: 9 subscribers · 7,500 JMD income · 1 Old Jamaica essay in progress · Buff Bay church shoot completed. The full monthly update goes live on the Journey page on August 1st.
.
