Kevin Witter
First Photon is a weekly letter from Jamaica — exploring, preserving, and sharing the soul of the island through photography. Every Tuesday at first light: field technique from real shoots (First Light), location guides written from inside the country (Island Frame), dispatches from the Old Jamaica archive (Field Notes), my Lightroom process on actual frames (In The Edit), and the honest numbers behind building this into a career (The Journey).Five minutes to read. Free forever. Whether you shoot landscapes, you're planning a Jamaica trip, or you carry this island with you — this is written for you.
What sits on top of the tallest waterfall in Jamaica.
One of the many pools above Nonsuch falls- Portland Above the waterfall Most people who journey to Nonsuch never see the most incredible features of the waterway. Fueled by the spectacle of the “tallest falls in Jamaica,” most visitors take the invigorating 45-minute hike — 45 minutes each way. The falls are amazing, no doubt. But I had already done that hike, and this time I wanted to explore the mysterious pools I’d noticed on my first visit. The late evening light I had anticipated was...
A painter starts with nothing.
The Open A painter starts with an empty canvas and adds until the picture is there. I start with the entire world, and the first thing I do is get rid of almost all of it. I wrote a line a few weeks ago, in passing, in the middle of a section about something else: photography is a subtractive art form by design. It was a throwaway. I've been thinking about it ever since, because the more I look at how I actually work, the more completely true it turns out to be. So this week, the whole thing....
The fourth time at Folly
I went photo hunting in Portland this week and ended up in two places I have already photographed more times than I can count. The marina. And Folly Point, looking back at the town. I didn't plan that. I had a morning, I had a camera but no plan, and my feet took me where they always take me. And the frames are the best I took at either one Nobody Writes About the Fourth Visit Every piece of photography advice is about finding somewhere new. Scout a location. Research the spot. Chase the...
What I’m actually doing here
I was adjusting my framing on a church in Buff Bay when curiosity got the better of me, and I googled the graves in the churchyard. That's when I found out where the walls came from. England. The stone crossed the Atlantic as ballast — dead weight carried by ships with nothing better to put in the hold. When they got here and loaded their actual cargo, the ballast was dumped on the dock. Somebody looked at that pile of discarded rock and built a church out of it. The church I was standing in...
Where the sky and the sea meet
I spent the afternoon at the pier making perfectly decent photographs. Boats on the water, the treeline behind them, the light going gold on white hulls: good light, clean compositions, nothing wrong with any of it. Then I drove up to the hospital, looked back down at the town, and saw the lights coming on across the roofs while the harbour behind them turned blue. Four hours of work at sea level, and the best frame of the day came from standing somewhere higher and turning around. But the...
Winnifred Beach and a Slow shutter
You may have received a half-built version of this earlier. That was me clicking the wrong button on the wrong draft. Here's the actual issue. Through Rocks and Salt Water Two cliff-like rock formations. Knee-deep water with the camera bag held over my head. Razor-sharp coastal rock in near darkness. That's what it took to stand where I shot this. The rock in the foreground was needlessly uncooperative, so I composed around it. And then the actual work started. On a shoreline like this,...
Ballast, in Buff Bay
I drove past this building for years. Buff Bay is a place you go through. The road bends by the gas station, the church sits back off it behind a mango tree, and unless something makes you stop, you don't. Then one morning I was up early enough that the light was still coming in low across the grass, and the whole thing looked like it had been lit for me—old, weathered Graves with vines grown right over them. Stained glass windows catching the low light. A castellated tower that belongs in a...
Find Your 5:00 AM
Boston Beach at First Light I must have walked this stretch of road a thousand times. Conservatively. I've reached that beach and swum those shores — sort of — more times than I can count. It's a five-minute walk from my house. After many summers' worth of sunrises, Boston Beach is still my favourite place to shoot, and it's where I trained. Whatever practice I have, I built it on that sand. So this week is a location guide. Except it isn't, really. The Ultimate Location Guide Is Not About a...
Coffee, bicycles, and Captain Quao
Kyaana Adventure Limited is a registered eco-tour company built around health, wellness, local culture, and heritage. They offer immersive nature and cultural tours Dont forget your camera but also don't forget that you have your camera. Walking these trails is breathtaking in both senses: the views and the gradient. Usually I hike this road and only get to look at it between rest stops. Today Kyaana is doing the heavy lifting: Removing the friction. We were up in time for the first light on...
Coffee, bicycles, and Captain Quao
Kyaana Adventure Limited is a registered eco-tour company built around health, wellness, local culture, and heritage. They offer immersive nature and cultural tours Dont forget your camera but also don't forget that you have your camera. Walking these trails is breathtaking in both senses: the views and the gradient. Usually I hike this road and only get to look at it between rest stops. Today Kyaana is doing the heavy lifting: Removing the friction. We were up in time for the first light on...
The greens at Fort George
I have never had to fight a photograph to make it less colourful anywhere except here in Portland. Standing at that wall with the sun coming across it, the greens growing out of the stone were doing something no slider setting was going to fix later. Portland greens are not the gentle greens of a field in Scotland. These greens glow with the neon radiance of a highlighter. And the sky behind the chimney pots was that thick tropical blue that looks fake the moment you add any saturation to it....
First Photon is a weekly letter from Jamaica — exploring, preserving, and sharing the soul of the island through photography. Every Tuesday at first light: field technique from real shoots (First Light), location guides written from inside the country (Island Frame), dispatches from the Old Jamaica archive (Field Notes), my Lightroom process on actual frames (In The Edit), and the honest numbers behind building this into a career (The Journey).Five minutes to read. Free forever. Whether you shoot landscapes, you're planning a Jamaica trip, or you carry this island with you — this is written for you.