Planet Earth

When I was young, I could not understand why my dad loved to watch nature programs on TV. Nature was boring and something for older people, I concluded. Fast forward twenty years and I'm the one who watches nature shows on the tube. For the past three Sunday nights, we have been glued to the TV to watch the Planet Earth program on the Discovery channel. It is a fantastic, although sometimes disturbing, show and the photography is spectacular. Never before had I heard of elephants in the desert or camels in snow. The other day, my husband asked me, "Why do we hate predators so much?" I had no answer. We humans aren't really innocent creatures. Animals, after all, only kill to feed themselves and their young. Humans, on the other hand, kill animals without need and without thinking about the consequences. When I thought about the predators of humpback whales, for example, I could only come up with one: humans. So--who are we to judge when an animal who has gone hungry for days kills another animal to feed itself and its young? Survival drives all life on earth.

Personally, I was hoping that I would be photographing birds by now, but winter has made another appearance here and the temperatures are still hovering in the forties. While this would be decent weather in January, it's a bit harder to take in April. Everything that was getting ready to bloom either froze or came to a standstill. I can't wait to see blooming and green trees. It's no surprise that the juncos are still here and I'm worried whether the hummingbirds will survive their spring migration. I guess I will hang up my feeders a little later than usual.

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.