Simply, a lightpainting photo is an image made with a handheld, constant light source in a dark room or environment. The camera’s sensor captures only what you choose to illuminate. Lightpainting images can range from relatively simple to fairly complicated. Striking photos can be created indoors with nothing more than a still life subject, a tabletop to put it on, and a small LED penlight to light it. Or you can think big: how about a mega-powerful spotlight illuminating prairie land in the Grand Tetons or a mesa in Monument Valley?

The assignment from Endless Vacation magazine was to photograph the Gullah and Geechee people of the sea islands off Georgia and South Carolina. "The magazine was interested in portraying a people who live and work in much the same way as their...

After a while, showing wasn’t enough. Telling became the point.

And because Chris Heisey knows his Civil War, he has a lot to tell in his photographs.

Chris has been photographing Civil War battlefields for almost 20 years, and at the start he took straightforward record shots. “I’m self-taught,” he says, “and...