Jay McCabe

“You can’t shoot the same thing all the time,” Sammuel Lopez-Licea says in response to our comment about the variety of subjects he chooses for his photos. The choosing is pretty much the easy part: many things catch his eye. What’s equally creative and most interesting to him is deciding how he wants to depict those interests—how he’ll use composition, framing, motion, light, and color, or how he’ll take color away in post-processing.

From the photos that Ben sent us prior to his graduation from Appalachian State with a degree in commercial photography, we were not surprised to learn that he grew up wanting to be a film director. “It was a big dream from the time I was a little kid,” he says. But when he got into photography, he found the still image had its own esthetic attractions, and practical advantages. “I can get my models to places I wouldn’t be able to get a film crew to,” Ben says, “and I’m able to create images that are visually more appealing than anything I can do on film right now.”

To photograph the wild horses of the Outer Banks of North Carolina you have to deal with the fact that they are indeed wild and thus not particularly welcoming of a photographer’s attention.
But first you have to deal with the Outer Banks, a 200-mile stretch of barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina. “It’s important to have an awareness of time, tide, and weather,” Lisa Cueman says of the location. “You can get into your photography, but not so much that you lose a sense of your surroundings.”