Photography

Light and time weav­ing together as they will, occa­sion­ally illu­mi­nate the ordi­nary or com­mon­place with an almost mys­ti­cal beauty. Cap­tur­ing those illu­sive moments became my chal­lenges and delight – until I pho­tographed my first Egret in flight.
Those early chal­lenges soon became back­ground to cap­tur­ing the move­ment and emo­tions of my self-willed sub­jects. The birds con­tin­u­ally sur­prise and delight me with their skill­ful grace in mas­ter­ing flight and in their incred­i­ble beauty.

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I do not ‘Pho­to­shop’ or manip­u­late my pho­tos. I do, how­ever, elim­i­nate bits of trash from the scene and adjust color tone and den­sity as well as soft­ness or sharp­ness of the final print to achieve the effect I tried to cap­ture – but no more so than any artist work­ing in other mediums.

My inter­est in pho­tog­ra­phy began when I was 16 or 17 and my first pas­sion in life, fly­ing, over­took me and I began pho­tograph­ing air­planes. After my sec­ond or third roll of Kodak film I recall one photo where I was struck by the qual­ity of the light.  A dab­bled with pho­tog­ra­phy off and on until I was about 26 when I got seri­ous and dove into it headfirst.

All my early work was in black and white. I had decided that I needed to mas­ter that before try­ing color. My first cam­era was an Argus C-3, my first dark­room a blacked out bath­room.  Over the years I pro­gressed through Pen­tax and Olym­pus cam­eras even­tu­ally set­tling on Con­tax 35 mm. While I pho­tographed most any­thing that caught my fancy, most of my best work was in land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy and infor­mal por­traits. For a time, life inter­vened and pushed my cam­eras aside as I was obliged to focus on other things. When I returned, dig­i­tal was begin­ning to push out film and I felt it was time to make a choice.

At that point I pur­chased an Olym­pus E-20, not quite the sin­gle lens reflex I had become accus­tomed to but near enough to feel like I had a cam­era in my hands and not some toy. I liked their approach and when Olym­pus brought out the model E-1, I jumped on it. I am still with Olym­pus and await­ing their next pro­fes­sional body. Cur­rently I use the fol­low­ing in my bird photography:

Olym­pus E-3  (2)
Zuiko ZD150 mm f2.0
Zuiko ZD300 mm f2.8
Zuiko ZD 90 – 250 mm f2.8
Zuiko ZD 50 – 200 mm f2.8 – 3.5
Zuiko 70 – 300 mm f4.09-f.63

(I have sev­eral oth­ers lenses as well but you won’t find their images on these pages.)

I plan to offer a few sug­ges­tions and tips on pho­tograph­ing wild birds in posts in this blog under the cat­e­gory Pho­tograph­ing Wilds Birds.