Why I photograph

I came to photography by accident. Yes, I had always loved to take vacation photos and had taken a couple of photography classes geared at amateurs. Sadly, my photos from the 1970s have faded badly. I traveled extensively during the 1980s and I now wish that I had decent photos from that time. The way I traveled, though (backpacking, bus tours, even hitchhiking), prohibited carrying around a big camera.
After my husband and I started dating, we traveled every weekend to a different town and he took a camera along. He graduated into shooting 35mm transparencies and purchased another camera for me. I took my first slides during a vacation to Norway. Unfortunately, it rained the entire week we were there, off and on. Needless to say, most of our photos are not top quality. But I was hooked. I signed up for a photography course with the New York Institute of Photography and we listened to the lessons together. We wanted to operate a homebased portrait studio photographing children and pets, but things didn't work out.
Over the years, my interest in portraits waned. After buying a house here in Pennsylvania, we began to feed the many birds in our backyard. We purchased a 35mm digital camera and I was finally able to photograph birds with a telephoto lens (the digital sensor extends the lengths of a lens). Six months later, I took a photo of an airborne Tufted Titmouse that has won me two awards so far and a feature on TV. But fame alone is not the reason why I photograph.
Photography gives me an opportunity to see the world in detail that I would otherwise overlook. There are photo opportunities everywhere you look. In the city, that could be a fire escape or an interesting shadow or colorful store front. In a state park, there are grasses, trees, water, fungi, animals and birds that beg to be photographed. By showing people the beauty of nature, I hope that they, too, will want to protect it. Children are particularly attracted to my bird photographs and I hope that they will take that enthusiasm into their adult lives. Our own future depends on it.