Amish Lifestyle Professional Travel Photographer Writer Stock Images
Michael ONeill Photographer Writer Motorcyclist Adventurer
Home »
Photos From The Road

Amish Lifestyle Professional Travel Photographer Writer Stock Images

My travels by motorcycle this year took me to the Amish Country near Lancaster, Pennsylvania on three different occasions. This is such a beautiful area of the country enhanced by the presence of a wonderful subset of society…the Amish and Mennonite people. Over the course of my visits I had the pleasure of meeting and interacting with members of this population, and couldn’t help but document their lifestyle (albeit discreetly) with my camera. The etiquette of photographing the Amish people is something that is greatly misunderstood. The best explanation I’ve read of it appears on the Discover Landcaster web site which says: "The Amish hold humility as a highly-cherished value and view pride as a threat to community harmony. Because items such as personal photographs can accentuate individuality and call attention to one's self, they are prohibited from the home. They want to be remembered by the lives they lived and the examples they left, not by physical appearance." In other words it is not disrespectful to photograph the people of this culture, but any photographs made should be made in the most discreet and respectful manner possible. This photograph was taken from a great distance away from the subject with the aid of a powerful Nikkor telephoto lens mounted on my Nikon mirrorless camera. The original digital image was processed in Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop software to yield the finished image you see here. The "digital darkroom" I use to post process my images travels with me everywhere in the form of an Apple MacBook Pro laptop computer. One of the things that struck me so powerfully over the course of my visits and observations to this land was of the incredible work ethic that is held by these people. It is commonplace to see the Amish farmers working their lands in the first light before dawn; or at dusk as the sun sets below the horizon for the day. Eschewing modern day technology the hard working farmers use primitive horse drawn agricultural equipment to work every aspect of their lands from sowing the crops to their ultimate harvest. So interesting was this culture that I found myself returning to the region multiple times to document the lifestyle. My motorcycle ventures often have a theme and the trips I made to this area of the country all revolved around creating dynamic photographic images of the Amish lifestyle. You will see other photographs here on my web site created during my numerous motorcycle adventures to the region. I am often asked to write about my travels to accompany the photographs I’ve made thereon. My trips to the Amish region were documented in numerous travel publications and online outlets in both the motorcycling and photographic industries. They also served as the back stories behind two chapters of my Amazon #1 best selling road travel book, "Road Work: Images and Insights of a Modern Day Explorer", which is available in paperback and Kindle versions on Amazon; and is also available on Apple Books. I have an extensive inventory of stock photographs created during my travels in The Amish Pennsylvania Dutch country. Feel free to contact me with your photographic needs. If I haven’t already photographed it, I’m always looking for any reason to climb on my BMW motorcycle and travel to any great destination in the United States or Canada for your assignment.