For a guy who takes such captivating photos of boats and coastal maritime settings—especially during ferocious storms—Benjamin Williamson has a surprisingly limited amount of experience being out on the water when the waves kick up and there’s a nasty blow.
He grew up in Mississippi, where he spent a fair bit of his childhood paddling around a lake in a canoe. When he was 16, his family moved to Maine, where he would go out on his father’s 23-foot catboat about 10 or 20 times a year. The family would mostly sail in and around Brunswick, but never when there was any significant breeze. “My mom was always terrified any time we’d heel over in the wind, so we didn’t get to enjoy it that much,” he says. “But I’ve always been on the water.”
It was in Maine around 2011 that he realized he had a knack for, and then a passion for, photography. He was taking walks around his house in Brunswick when he started picking up a camera for fun. Quickly, he says, he became obsessed.
“It was beautiful beaches and the fishing culture that involves a lot of lobstering,” Williamson says. “The lighthouses drew me in too. I thought those were really unique from an aesthetic perspective and culturally significant for the area. They tell a story about humans caring about each other.”
Taking photos became the only thing he wanted to do, even if his kit was, by most professional standards, quite limited. He started out by shooting with a Canon PowerShot and then upgraded to a Canon Rebel. “I had the lens that it came with, and for two years, that’s all I had for gear, but I would take tons of photos, and I would scour books that I checked out of the library,” he says. “I networked with other photographers and asked a bunch of questions like, ‘How do you edit a photo to make it look better?’”
At the time, he was married, but yet to have the three kids who are part of the family today. His wife was in school back then too, so he had time to take photographs and post them online. Within a few years, he got the attention of Down East magazine, whose team started requesting photos and then sending him on assignments. “My first assignment was a good one,” he says. “They sent me to Lubec to photograph a state park. I got lucky with the weather.” In 2016, the magazine offered him the job of staff photographer.
Since 2022, Williamson has been his own boss with Benjamin Williamson Photography. Half his business comes from hosting photography workshops and seminars, with the other half coming from print sales in gift shops, at craft fairs and elsewhere around Maine. Williamson says his specialties are lighthouses and lobster boats. He’s not shooting pure landscape images, he says. “It’s really about the places and spaces where man and nature come together and interact in beautiful ways.”
He has a serious knack for capturing weather events, which have fascinated him ever since he was a child. He remembers being a boy and running to the window when storms came through. He also was a dedicated viewer of The Weather Channel. “As a teenager, when the Internet came around, I would watch what the forecasters were talking about behind the scenes,” he says.
That passion now translates into his photographs, including two of the favorite images he has captured so far. An image (shown above) titled “December 23, 2022 Portland Head Light,” he says, includes “the most dramatic wave I’ve ever seen. That was an absolutely catastrophic storm. After the wave hit, I walked around to the lighthouse and saw lots of damage—a door blown up, a window blown out, the slate walkway washed away. It showed me how powerful these storms are.”
Another of his favorites is an image titled, simply, “Maine Lightning,” (shown at right). He shot it from the trunk of his car, with the hatchback open to protect him from the storm. It includes a purple-blue sky. “That’s the real color,” he says. “It was late twilight, with a bolt of lightning filling about two-thirds of the frame. It’s so picturesque, the structure of the bolt, the branching nature of it,” Williamson says. “I’ve seen a lot of lightning bolts, but never one that’s almost perfectly symmetrical like that.”
That particular photograph, he adds, is an example of how simply being in the right place at the right time and taking a lot of photographs can often yield an exceptional result. “Mother Nature was the artist for that one,” he says. “I was just lucky enough to be there at the right time to capture it.”
May 2025
