I've enjoyed photography ever since I got my first box camera as a child and set up a primitive darkroom in my parent's laundry. I still have a few of those pictures -- they've held up better than I have. Then about 12 years ago I discovered the joys of close-up photography, particularly of wildflowers, using a 2X teleconverter attached to my ancient Pentax. The images often seemed better than the real thing! I became obsessed with learning to identify the flowers I was shooting which led to the publication, in 1998, of the CD-ROM "Wildflowers of the San Francisco Bay Area" in collaboration with Glenn Keator and John Game.

The 600 images on the CD were all obtained by scanning 35mm slides or negatives -- a long and tedious process. Since then I've happily switched to digital cameras starting with a Nikon 950, a superb choice for close-up work. Many of the images on this site were taken with that camera. As my interest in the natural world broadened to birds and other animals I needed more telephoto power, provided by a Nikon 5700 (with built in 8X zoom). The Everglades images on this site were all taken with the 5700. Ironically though, the picture of the double crested cormorant was taken in macro (wildflower) mode -- I was standing in touching distance of this bird. Did you notice that the eye of the cormorant looks like an emerald set in a ring of diamonds?

Is it Art? That's for you, the viewer, to decide. I do pay attention to composition, lighting, contrast and such stuff but often the best pictures come as a surprise. Perhaps the artistic component is in recognizing a good shot when I have it.

Do I digitally enhance my images? You bet! First, there are few images that can't be improved by judicious cropping, especially those of moving targets. Second, the image capturing devices of digital cameras are not perfect (neither is film) so I use Photoshop to adjust the contrast, color balance etc. back to how I remember the image. It's also sometimes useful to be able to clean up an image. For example, in the photo of the Anhinga swimming, the water surface was littered with debris that resulted in distracting little white flecks that ruined the photo. With Photoshop's cloning tool and a little patience I got rid of these. Never-the-less I only use photoshop as a tweaking tool -- it cannot make a good image out of a poor photo.