Worth a Thousand Words

Lake Wales Photographer Adam Strang Bass Captures Images of Old Florida

- PAUL CATALA

It’s not hard to picture the scene.

Adam Strang Bass lives in the world he captures in his photographs. After a day of fishing with his children on Lake Marion Creek east of Haines City, he’s on his home porch frying up a freshwater captain’s platter of bluegill, pumpkin seeds and shell crackers.

Although Bass has a fork in his hand rather than a camera, that’s the exception. On days when he’s not working as a director of conservation for Conservation Florida, Bass is out doing what he loves: catching and preserving Florida’s vanishing wildernesses and wildlife.

Bass is a Winter Haven native now living off Lake Pierce in Lake Wales for the past year and a half with his wife, Kim, son Max, 7 and daughter Hattie, 4. Over the past three years, he has become an active, award-winning Florida landscape and wildlife photographer. And along the way, he’s worked to preserve vestiges of old Florida scenes from Pensacola to Miami and ways of life that seem to be disappearing beneath the cement and ongoing push of bulldozers.

Photography isn’t just a hobby and certainly doesn’t make a living for Bass; it has become more of a quest to preserve during the week and weekends.

“I don’t make a living doing it, don’t even come close,” says Bass, 35. “Honestly, I picked it up about three years ago to get back into art. I wanted some sort of creative outlet. I’m a big outdoorsman and spend a lot of time working outside. That’s where I like to be, out on the Everglades headwaters.”