I have been an avid photographer for more than fifty years. After learning to develop film and prints in high school, I took courses in the history and practice of photography in college and in one course built an 8 x 10 view camera. For the next ten years, during my Edward Weston phase, I would only use a large format camera and make black and white prints. As my careers in construction and house design left less time for photography, I switched back to 35 mm and found that I only took pictures when traveling. After I retired, I was able to spend much more time on landscape photography and started exhibiting my photographs at local galleries. Like so many photographers I have switched from film to digital technology and am just as thrilled by seeing a good print come out of the printer as I ever was in watching an image appear in the darkroom developing tray. I love the instant feedback of editing images on the computer, and I don’t miss the chemicals.
In addition to its natural beauty, Lopez is fortunate to have a generous amount of preserved public lands which I have been wandering with a camera since moving here in the early nineties. Until recently I concentrated on landscape images and only occasionally shot birds and flowers. A few years, ago I decided that I should try to learn the names of the local wildflowers and that the way for me to do this was to photograph any wildflower I saw and then try to identify it by comparing the image I had captured with the images in guidebooks and online sites. It quickly became an engaging and satisfying endeavor. I was especially intrigued by how a close-up image exposes the amazing beauty and astounding details of the flowers. The WILDFLOWERS album includes every species of wildflower that I have found on Lopez organized by the month in which the photo was taken. I have noted which plants are noxious and/or non-native.
More recently I have taken the same approach to learning the local birds. Once again I am obsessively on the hunt for new specimens, this time with a much larger and heavier lens. I find photographing birds much more challenging than wildflowers as they are much less willing to pose for a photo. But there has also been the reward of seeing for the first time the astonishing beauty of the details in the feathers which comes through in a photograph in a way it never has for me through binoculars. As with the wildflowers, the BIRDS album includes every species that I have been able to photograph, and I will continue to add images of new species as I find them and to replace existing images with more aesthetically pleasing ones as I take them.
This website is a way for me to share these photos with others. In addition to the birds and wildflowers collections which I have pursued more systematically, I have added a few other genres in the AND ALL THE REST album. These collections are not intended to be as comprehensive as the birds and wildflowers collections and include only a few images I have captured over the years. I hope to pursue these topics more thoroughly in the future.
As a photographer, I experience nature more as a visual than as a scientific pursuit. I am not a botanist or biologist and welcome any corrections to my identifications