The Camera & Eye

My earliest recollections of photography go back to when I was ten years old and a frequent visitor to the Bronx Zoo in New York City. I begged my parents to let me take some pictures of my favorite animals: an Andean Condor and a Lowland Gorilla. They showed me how to use a twin-lens Rolleiflex with its dark and grainy reversed image viewfinder. Considering the circumstances, my photos were not too bad. I still have a few of them - and the Rolleiflex.  I pretty much ignored photography through most of my elementary and high school years except for those Instamatic snapshots that I took on our yearly summer expeditions to Florida. Once in college, however, my desire to learn more about the wild places in Florida grew as a result of the fieldwork for my ecology classes at the University of Miami. My father loaned me his Minolta SR-1 SLR along with a few lenses and I was off and shooting.   

I settled in Miami after graduation and began to document the native plants of this region as a means to learn about them. For almost fifty years, I explored the Everglades, Big Cypress Swamp, or the Florida Keys several times each month. The Greater Everglades watershed continued to nourish my roots, be my photographic playroom, and offer me retreat and rejuvenation. 

Over time, I developed a desire to broaden my ecological and photographic horizons, so I organized a Galapagos Islands’ natural history workshop for teachers in the summer of 1984 and spent three weeks traveling and shooting in the Ecuadorian Andes, the Amazon basin, and the Galapagos archipelago. It was a great way to feed two birds with one scone: i.e. broaden my cultural and photographic world views. This workshop was so well received that for the next twelve summers, I organized similar science teacher workshops; four to Ecuador, three to Kenya, and five to Costa Rica. During this adventures, my artist's eye continued to develop as I honed my skills of observation of light, structures and textures, hidden and visible patterns, forms and shapes in a wide variety of settings. I photographed with film cameras (Konica until 1992 when I moved to Nikon) until 2005 when I switched over to Nikon DLSR captures and then to a Nikon mirrorless system in 2024.

As a Professor of Environmental Science & Ecology at Miami Dade College, I served their Honors College as Lead Faculty Advisor for six student seminars in global citizenship in Salzburg and Vienna, Austria and used my free time to make photos in these beautiful locations. Family trips around the Caribbean also afforded me opportunities to photograph people, cultures, and nature very different from those of my own bioregion. 

I continued to visit and photograph Costa Rica at least once a year for almost 30 years because it had captured a huge part of my heart. I consider it my second home and I have published six books of Costa Rican images including "The Spirit of Costa Rica – Honoring the Elements". This book became the inspiration for my most recent photographic work in Virginia.  

After forty-five years as an educator, I retired in 2019 as Professor Emeritus from MDC and moved to Richmond with my spouse in 2021. Since that time, I have devoted more time to new photographic projects such as pro bono work for local area non-profit organizations that serve children. I continue to deepen and widen my personal point of view of this new bioregion and to explore the intersections between Spirit and nature through the camera lens.