Brenda Tharp: the (Sprinter) Van Life
Nature photographer Brenda Tharp and her partner, Jed Manwaring, also a pro photographer, have been “living the van life” full time since the fall of 2022. “My home base is currently a Sprinter van. It’s about 100 square feet of living space and we’re loving it! We’re working from the road, teaching workshops, doing webinars and getting some books and other things going. It’s still a working home, but we just love the fact that we’re living out there, surrounded by beautiful nature and exploring the whole of the United States this way.” Tharp will come off the road for a few says to lead a Super Session, “Creating Expressive Nature Photographs,” on May 14th at the 2025 NANPA Summit in Tucson, Arizona.
A different view leads to new inspirations
Tharp’s passion is nature photography. “I realize that that’s a big umbrella,” she says. “My favorite subjects are probably intimate and grand landscape photography, but I also do wildlife and macro photography. I’m an all-around nature photographer because I find it all so wonderful. It’s hard to narrow things down when there’s this plethora of opportunities that are gorgeous and interesting and fascinating.”
The van lifestyle has her “really excited to have this new type of adventure in my life because I think it’s bringing me new inspiration, as I have more time to immerse myself in whatever I am exploring. Sometimes when you’re in your home working all the time, you just have to get out and photograph. Now, we’re out all the time and the difficulty is the reverse. We’ve got to carve out time to work and not just play and photograph.”
©Brenda Tharp
New Jersey origin story
Tharp grew up in New Jersey, which doesn’t strike many people as a haven for nature. “Everybody thinks of it in terms of the Turnpike and Hoboken and all the gritty stuff that runs along the east side of the state. But there are really a lot of beautiful natural places in New Jersey.
“When I was growing up there, my family was big on the outdoors. We went hiking and camping a lot. We traveled the whole eastern seaboard on camping trips and that immersed me in nature. My dad had a camera and he was the family recorder of our trips, as well as the scenery that we saw. He was really my main inspiration because I followed in his footsteps. I found photography fascinating, and he gave me his hand-me-down cameras whenever he needed a new one. That’s how I got into photography.”
Turning pro
It took a little longer for Tharp to get into photography as a professional. She was working for Hewlett-Packard and living in New Jersey, while photographing outdoors every chance she could get. She started entering nature photography competitions, having small shows in nature centers and getting write-ups in local newspapers.
“I started thinking,” she said, “this is really what I want to do! But it was hard to break from the expectations of everyone around me.” Long story short, she moved to Colorado in 1985 and “hung out my shingle as a professional nature photographer. And that was really where the career began.”
“I started out saying I’m a professional nature photographer. And then I realized that that was a really hard way to make a living back then. People were saying, ‘Oh, you’re not going to survive with just nature.’ I didn’t have any income at that point, so that was the impetus to start looking around at how I could generate some income without compromising my love for being outdoors and photographing nature.” She started doing corporate and some advertising work. She says she learned a lot about the business of photography, about all the planning and research that was required, how to use lights (“which I really hated, but that’s another story”), the skills involving connecting with people, writing proposals and bids, and actually getting jobs.
“But, between all of that,” she says, “I was still out in nature all the time because although the corporate work was paying the bills it wasn’t filling up my soul. I thought I had to somehow make a turn on my path, so I started looking at editorial work in magazines like Sunset Magazine, Travel Holiday Magazine, and Nat Geo Traveler. These were opportunities for me to get out and do assignments that put me out in nature. That really changed things for me and I pulled away from the corporate work into editorial assignments.”
Tharp was able to apply many of the skills she learned doing corporate work–looking at locations, developing an eye for visual design–into her nature photography. All of it meshed together. Creating artificial light in corporate work taught her how to recognize the natural light that’s out there and how to best use it. The travel photography she did, including a lot of street photography, helped her learn how to anticipate and capture moments in the natural world.
©Brenda Tharp
Favorite places
Now that she’s living the van life, where are her favorite places? “I love the desert. I love the Southwest Red Rock Country in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and the starkness of Death Valley. It presents a visual challenge. Over time, though, I’ve learned that the desert will give up its gifts if you are patient and you wait and hang out long enough.
“But,” she continued, “I also love the softness of the woods, the deciduous forest of the Upper Midwest and East Coast and the changing fall colors and I love the mountains, too. What can I say? I just I love exploring. I think I’m a mountain girl more than a desert or ocean girl, but I love all these environments very much.”
For Tharp, exploring might be a better answer than a single favorite place, going out with an open mind and a lot of flexibility for whatever nature throws her way. Last Autumn, for example, she went to Colorado, Capitol Reef, and Zion in search of fall color. Colorado had brilliant colors but the leaf change in Capitol Reef and Zion was quite late. “You have to manage expectations,” she says, “because you’ve driven all this way and now the color is not happening. So, what else is here? It challenges you to open up your eyes. get past your expectations and see the things that are there. There’s always something to photograph.”
Subject or style
If not a favorite place, what about a subject or style of photography? Grand landscapes? Nope. They’re great but, Tharp says, “I love it, but it is really challenging. The conditions have to be just so right for it to be a successful image. I have for a long time been drawn to the intimate landscape, which is in between macro and the grand landscape.
The intimate landscape allows me to not only celebrate the things that most of us walk by, but also to really look at all of the designs that are in nature, all the patterns and the textures, the lines, the shapes, forms, all of that … which has always gotten me excited. My books, Creative Nature and Outdoor Photography, both the first and the second editions, emphasized looking for those elements. That’s the body of work that excites me the most. I’m thinking about doing a fine-art book where I’ll either write essays or maybe a little bit of poetry to go along with images that celebrate intimate landscapes. I think too many people get besotted with the big landscape and it does hit you over the head when you’re in a beautiful location. But everybody’s photographing it. It’s difficult to be unique there, so looking for your own personal vision in the intimate realm I think is what really works for me right now.
©Brenda Tharp
Van life to conference hotel
What makes Brenda Tharp come off the road and attend the 2025 NANPA Summit? “The in-person summit has always been exciting because there is such a strong camaraderie. You are with so many people that are like-minded, kindred spirits, even if they’re photographing wildlife and you’re photographing the intimate landscape. It’s still born from a passion for nature—to photograph it and share it with everyone. Early on, when I first started going to those summits, there were so many people that I could learn from. As a developing photographer, I was learning a lot by going to the breakout sessions and listening to the keynote speakers, in addition to just having a blast meeting people.
“As I developed my own style and my own career was going along, I still found that it was such a wonderful way to meet up with friends that you don’t otherwise see. Nature photography is a solo sport. You can go out with your friends but, ultimately, you’re going to wander off on your own path to make your own pictures. Maybe come back to the car and talk about it or go for dinner together, but a lot of us are out here just doing our own thing and trying to keep our businesses going and thriving and that can be really solitary.
“I think that Summits are great because they bring you back together and they affirm your work and your purpose, and they rekindle the excitement because you see so many people that are on that same path as you to celebrate nature.”
“Often I come out of the session being awed by the work of whoever was presenting,” she continued, “and I want to get the heck out of the conference center and start photographing.”
Super Session
In her “Creating Expressive Nature Photographs” Super Session at the 2025 NANPA Summit, Tharp will be talking about the marriage of craft and vision, about how to approach nature with a mindfulness and a deeper connection to what you are photographing and go beyond the predictable image to really seek out a personal vision. “That’s one of the key things I want people to take away,” she says, “because I think that there’s a great deal of competition, visual competition that we see on social media. We see images we like, and we say, ‘oh, I want that. I want to create something like that,’ rather than looking for our own unique approach to whatever the subject is when we’re out there in the field. It can kill your creativity.”
Tharp says she plans to “talk about advanced ideas of composition and about making use of the light you have, not just waiting for sunrise and sunset golden hours, but actually recognizing the light you have and the potential of what you can do with that light.” Visual design elements will be another important component of her talk, too, all of which is based on her book Expressive Nature Photography. She hopes that taking a deeper dive into each of those topics will help people recognize how they can develop a more personal vision.
“I want to encourage people to realize that they are creative, that they have it within themselves. Some people come to workshops and they say, I just don’t feel creative. Well, hopefully from my super session, they’ll find that in fact they actually are creative and they’ll find ways to bring that to the surface when they’re out with their cameras.”
Exercise your creativity, get inspired, and network with fellow nature photographers at the 2025 NANPA Summit this May in Tucson, Arizona.
©Brenda Tharp
