The image uses below completes my list. None of the items on this page are for sale.
Contests
While many people are quite complementary about my work, once in a while I get inspired to enter some images into a competition. These contests are not a good venue for me because my tastes do not overlap well with the usual standards and because my photos may not be as good as those of top professionals. I did have one success when two of my images were semi-finalists in the 2019 Nature’s Best Windland Smith Rice Awards. This contest, along with the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, sponsored by the British Museum of Natural History, are the two most prestigious in the world. Both professionals and amateurs are eligible to enter, and each attract more than 30,000 photos. My two images were of an Ethiopian wolf hunting and of a Mother fur seal greeting her baby on return from fishing.
Coffee Table Books
Sometimes I have enough material from a trip to warrant making a self-published coffee table book. These are usually about 200 pages and have about 400 photos. All are called, “On Safari in …,” where … might be Kenya and Madagascar, for example. In these hard-cover books, I include many anecdotes from the trip associated with the pictures and the people. The format is 11” high by 13” wide, and the photos are displayed several to a page, one to a page, full bleed on a page, or across two pages. I have done seven, but there is a considerable obstacle to making another because they require months of work to produce. Truly good images usually do the trick to get out of the gate.
Los Alamos Photography Club Show
The Los Alamos Photography Club sponsors an annual show at the gallery of the Mesa Public Library in Los Alamos. The year 2019 was the 24th edition, but COVID-19 forced us to skip 2020 and possibly 2021. Twenty to Thirty photographers display up to 200 framed photos. This show has been our major public exhibition since 2010. The show garners the best visitation rate of the year from the community and runs for a month. I have volunteered to make the publicity poster and the show book for the last seven years. Of course, some of our images are included in these publications.
Slide Shows for Enthusiasts
I usually make a slide show from the combination of Beverly’s and my pictures. People who really want to know what we saw and birders who enjoy seeing lots of bird pictures comprise the audience. These shows run about two hours and require some endurance both for the viewers and my voice. These are shown on our television screen used as a computer monitor.
Slide Shows for the Public
A few years ago, I was approached by the director of the senior center in White Rock, one of the two communities comprising Los Alamos County. The idea was for the chef at the senior center’s kitchen to prepare a lunch from the cuisine of a country and for me to follow lunch with a one-hour slide show on that country. Hopefully, attendance would be noticeably greater than the usual 7-10 people who normally came to lunch. The idea was a great success, drawing from 30-80 people, and have been held monthly for more than two years. The only skipped months were when I was gathering new material, i.e. away on a photo shoot. I have given 24 such shows. I might have gone to 40 had COVID-19 not intervened.
As the Basis for Other Media
In 2012, we went to Churchill, Manitoba, Canada to photograph polar bears with two other couples, Tom and Jeanne Bowles and Joel and Ronnie Moss. When having a picture sharing party, Ronnie liked the image on the left enough to ask me for a copy to use in one of her paintings. As with many activities that had been on hold for a long time, the COVID pandemic gave her the time to actually make the watercolor on the right. She made greeting cards from the painting and sent me one as a thank you for sharing the original picture with her. She named the painting, “Good Bye Winter,” but it was actually the beginning of winter when the polar bears gather at the shore of the Hudson Bay waiting for the ice to freeze so they can venture out and hunt seals.
Beverly has wanted to replace some ugly yellow, plastic panels in our front door for 40 years. During the COVID pandemic, we had time to plan an exchange. We hired a local artist, Fran Stoval, that had been working in stained glass for more than 30 years. As we looked into the possibilities, I got the idea of using hummingbird pictures we had taken in Colombia in January of 2020 as the basis for the windows. It took about six weeks to make the six 5” x 20” panels. Fran had to take some artistic liberties to adapt the images to stained glass. On the left, you can see one of the original images of a Black-tailed Trainbearer and the resulting panel in the middle left of the door. Beverly and I each contributed three images, and Fran supplemented our pictures with some from Google.