For our last speaker’s night of this season, we present the iconoclastic Lew Lorton, who actually has a temperament like a lot of us. In his professional background, Lew had a long and checkered career as an Army officer, VP of a statistical consulting company, CIO of a health care research organization, Executive Director of a technology consortium, and finally the founder of a small Internet company.

He has been married for a very long time and has five grown children, including two sons named Michael. Lew says that realizing at last that he was wasting a great deal of time working, he retired and got pretty serious about photography. (Sounds like many of us!) Since mountains, trees, and buildings don’t move very much and most wildlife moves too quickly to catch, he didn’t see either of those kinds of photography as much of a fit with his temperament. So…he began to concentrate on shooting pictures of people. He used to shoot with full frame Nikons but has switched to mirrorless cameras – Sony A7 II and Olympus OM-D E-M5. He loves prints more than screen images.

A return trip to Vietnam aroused Lew’s love of South East Asia and its various peoples, and he has been back there several times – three times to Myanmar, three times to Vietnam, twice to Laos, and once to Cambodia. Each of these trips started and ended with some time in Thailand. His most recent trip was in February, 2015 when he traveled through the north of Thailand and over the border into Laos up near China, all by bus and boat. Lew has never gone on a tour and prefers to travel ad hoc with only a faint schedule and a plane reservation home. His love of street photography influences the photos he takes while traveling, and in Lew’s May presentation, he’ll talk about how that all fits together.

Lew’s web site and blog are www.lewlortonphoto.com