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Photo Galleries
beautiful fine art digital photography from around the world
Flower Riot
Flower Riot - Since we have lived in the Berkshires Nina has maintained an ever rotating cutting flower garden in our front yard with many species (some with names known by me, others not). From time to time over the years I take my camera with intermediate and close up focus lenses and a couple of lens babies for mini expeditions among the flowers. These are some of my favorites.
Arctic Ice
Arctic Ice - The Arctic is much more than Polar Bears of course as there are Arctic Foxes, Svalbard Reindeer (long ago crossed over the ice hundreds of miles north from Norway), birds by the millions, several species of whales making their rounds, seals and sea lions and walruses (both Pacific and Atlantic) and ice. Glaciers from which icebergs break off, ice tongues sticking far out into the water, bergy bits (car or bus sized chunks of ice) all freshwater originating from the glaciers which represent millennia of snow accumulation, and many forms of sea ice from newly forming grease ice up to quite thick multi year ice, all of which is formed as sea water freezes at approximately 29 degrees Fahrenheit. Aboard ship we spend endless hours looking both for and at wildlife and ice.
Greek Islands
Greek Islands - years ago early in the digital age we visited Greece with Elder Hostel (now known as Road Scholar) on a wonderful trip using public ferries to move from island to island where we stayed in small family run hotels. While we island hopped visiting archeological sites many days, what especially sticks in my mind and digital photographic library are the days and nights spent on Santorini. Fortunately we were there during a period when only a few small ocean liners dropped passengers off for the day. Between 6PM and 10AM it felt like the island was ours. Of course although there were hundreds if not thousands of other tourists on the island overnight, it wasn’t ten thousand dropped off by two or three large ships and in exploring the town it sometimes felt as though we were alone. Santorini especially is one of the most beautiful and intriguing, and perhaps most photogenic, places I have ever been and most of the photographs in this gallery were taken there.
Walk in the Woods
A Walk In The Woods - during the depths of Covid times walking in the woods was one thing we could do without masks and I could still walk moderate distances then. The walks became much more interesting with a camera or iPhone in my hands as I learned to look much more closely at things I would earlier have just passed by.
Japan Winter Wildlife
Japan Winter Wildlife - In 2006 Nina and I joined a trip with Zegrahm Expeditions (no longer in business) during February just after moving to our new home in Great Barrington, MA to visit the Japanese Macaques (more commonly known as Snow Monkeys) which live in a geothermically active area of Nagano Prefecture in Western Honshu IslandJapan, some three hours by train from Tokyo. This is a resort area full of hot springs and, as the story apparently goes, sometime in the Nineteen Fifties an adolescent macaque ventured into one of the hot springs (monkeys generally stay away from pools as their bones are much denser than ours and they may drown). This one supposedly taught others and soon they were joining resort guests in their ryokan (country inn) hot springs. Eventually the people built Jigokudani Yaen-koen (Hell’s Valley), a small pool for the monkeys only and opened a monkey park, which today in winter attracts about 260 monkeys in several troops on a rotating basis which are managed and fed grains by the park staff. It’s small size attracts photographers and others and offers truly intimate experiences with the monkeys.
Antarctic Ice
Antarctic Ice - Bigger, Badder and much much more distinguishes South from North here as the enormity of Antarctic ice is often overwhelming and not to be believed until experienced.
Florida Birding
Florida Birding - my first real wildlife photographic experience (about which I wrote an article long ago for Nature Photographer Magazine - also one about dying tulips) was birding around Central Park only half a block from our Manhattan home. It started in the film days (here I didn’t rush down to the lab for one hour service) around what’s informally known as the Row Boat Pond in the early morning as I sought out the several species of herons, egrets and ducks as well as the Mute Swans which nested on a small island in the pond. As we went periodically to Florida in the winter we were always on the lookout for birding venues and my personal favorites are the Wakotohatchee Wetlands in Delray Beach in February and the Alligator Farm in St. Augustine (which is basically a zoo with a larger American Alligator swamp, examples of all the crocodilians, turtles, birds and other species as well. But here it is the originally unintended consequence of an alligator swamp that is the draw as many species of herons and egrets as well as Wood Storks and Roseate Spoonbills nest and roost here. Some of the smaller birds actually nest in the bushes right alongside the boardwalk so that even a small lens or cellphone can capture close up exposures of nesting birds with eggs or newly hatched chicks. If you’re interested, check out the Alligator Farm in the latter half of April and very early May.
Laos Monks In Morning
Monks in Morning - In 2010 we visited Laos on a trip that also included Cambodia and Burma (Myanmar). Every morning at dawn monks from a nearby Buddhist Temple would walk past the hotel driveway seeking alms, generally cooked rice, which was the principal element of their diet. As it began at dawn under very low light conditions, many of the images were taken with a very slow shutter creating the "in motion" effect. Others were taken as the light rose sufficiently for normal exposures as we followed them in the street and into the Temple.
Africa
Africa - Polar Bears may be my single favorite species to photograph but my dreams are often of Africa where we have now been six times with another planned for September 2024. And in Africa our favorite place so far has been Botswana where we have been four times ranging from mobile tent camping to four and five star tented camps. But it’s the intimacy with the animals, often known by name to the camp driver guides, that are the real attractants and the ability to stay with them long enough (especially if you go private) as long as you want (or at least long enough to observe particular behaviors). It’s really great when you have the time to follow an individual or group and be able to watch and sometimes even predict these particular behaviors. In the Land Rovers or other vehicles they are rarely bothered having grown up with them as part of the moving landscape - but don’t get up suddenly or out and break that understanding - you may be lunch. Of course it’s not only animals and not only Southern Africa. Wide open savannas, mountains, salt pans and in Namibia, fantastic dunes and tons of birds await your visit as well.
Paris
Paris - In 2013 we went to Paris for two weeks where we stayed not far from Notre Dame. These images represent people and places encountered along the way.
Tulips
Tulips - in this gallery I have included images taken in our home garden over the years with images taken at a West Side Community garden of tulips in varying stages of "dying" when we still lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. These images were shot on film and I would go to the garden in the morning, set up my camera with close up lens on a small tripod with cable release, shoot a roll or two, bus or subway downtown to the custom one hour lab, wait for the processed slides, return home to review and edit, toss the rejected ones and back to the garden to reshoot. The images I especially favored were then scanned and added to my very early digital file collection.
Pittsfield Colonials in Motion
Pittsfield Colonials in Motion - Many years ago during the short lived existence of the Pittsfield Colonials, a single A short season minor league team, I decided to have some fun experimenting with slow shutter exposure, mostly of the pitchers trying to capture their deliveries as ultra exaggerated motions. I worked with batters as well, but found that pitching motions generally produced the kind of results I was looking for. These are all single exposures just slow enough to create ghosting effects of moving body parts as though they were multiple stacked exposures.
Penguins
Penguins - What can be said about Penguins. Everyone seems to love them and so do I and over the years beginning in 2000 we have been fortunate enough to travel there four times, three times from Argentina down to the Antarctic Peninsula sometimes making landings on intermediate islands and on to South Georgia Island and then the Falkland Islands and once to the Ross Sea from Australia stopping at multiple intermediate islands, some controlled by Australia and some by New Zealand. The Southern Ocean (now officially an Ocean) is the wildest wickedest Ocean in the world, but is home to foraging whales of many species, albatrosses, giant petrels, seals, and many of the seventeen or so species of penguins only two of which, Adelie and Emperor are truly ice species. While the Adelies live around ice they nest on open areas building rock nests along with other species that live along the ice edges, in totally ice free areas or on the intermediate islands. Only the Emperor Penguins (as we all know from nature show and movies) actually live and raise their chicks on ice. We have been able on many of these trips to visit nesting sites ( now you have to stay five meters away and can’t put anything on the ground, but before these newer restrictive rules went into effect we could just sit at the edge of a colony of penguins and watch and wait as they went about their business) and been able to observe eggs, tiny chicks, eggs on feet, as well as what I can only call penguins scapes as tens of thousands of birds cover the landscape before us. While penguins stink, it’s a small price to pay for the experience.
Polar Bears
Polar Bears - We (and sometime I) have traveled many times in many places above the Arctic Circle since our initial trip on a Russian nuclear powered icebreaker to the North Pole in 1998. Since our first trip during the "Digital Age" to Canada’s Baffin Island in 2006 I have been accumulating images of Polar Bears, the single animal that has drawn me there so many times over a quarter century. This gallery represents some of my favorites, capturing them both up close and personal and in larger landscapes as they constantly roam searching for food, most pressingly seals caught unawares on the ice, but settling for carcasses, bird eggs or fallen bird chicks when trapped on land once the sea ice has begun to melt. It is the continually shortening ice season due to global warming that places them most at risk today.
Hancock Shaker Village
Hancock Shaker Village - We are fortunate to live near Hancock Shaker Village, a mid Nineteenth Century Shaker community now a living museum. I had visited many times over the years with regular cameras, with only ordinary results as far as I was concerned. At some point early in the 2014 season I got the idea (somehow I remember it was after seeing a professional photographer shoot the village for publicity from a drone) to go backwards in time (not literally) and try using my iPhone and then running the images through several apps I had to create effects which in many cases would mimic early photographic techniques. In the back of my mind I had an idea that perhaps I could get an exhibit at the Village sometime in the future. During the 2014-2016 seasons I shot and created through these apps a couple of thousand images, and shortly after heart surgery in 2016 met with the then curator who was intrigued and promised me a show the following season. Unfortunately, things changed under a new Director and curator and that exhibit never happened. I have however exhibited many of these images at several different venues and still consider this iPhone collection of images among the very best work I have ever done.
Cuban Classic American Cars
Cuba - Another, more recent, Road Scholar (formerly Elder Hostel) trip we made was to Cuba not long before Trump made travel there quite difficult. The sixteen days we spent on the island were fascinating and depressing at the same time and although I took a few thousand traditional photographs, very little in the way of subject matter grabbed me. What did, not surprisingly, were the “antique” American cars that Cubans have amazingly kept running for sixty, seventy or even eighty years. I started out photographing them with my regular camera and then began using my iPhone. Time in the evenings gave me the opportunity to try and then play with a number of iPhone apps I had downloaded, often the wilder the better. Frequently I wound up with variations on variations and before our trip concluded in Havana (where the majority of the cars are located) I had more than a thousand images and variations from at least half a dozen different apps.
India
India - We have been to India twice, both primarily wildlife driven, but in the end it wasn’t the wildlife I was most interested in. A large, ancient and incredibly numerous collection of peoples with a fascinating and diverse religious and cultural history over millennia, it was the people who offered for me the most colorful and compelling subjects. From the big cities with road traffic which included bicycles, motorbikes, scooters, Tuk-tuks, cars, trucks, donkeys, camels and elephants for transportation and cows as sacred animals who could go wherever they pleased, where horns and lights replaced traffic lights, to small rural towns and villages, life most often took place in the streets. As our group moved from place to place along local roads, often at moderate or slow speeds, I soon learned that shooting from our vehicles with relatively high ISO’s, wide open apertures and fast shutter speeds allowed me to catch snippets of that life on the streets. Rarely did I have the opportunity to set up a photograph although sometimes by first looking out the front windshield I had an idea of what was coming up. Often the images were happenstance and until I got home and had the images up on my computer I didn’t necessarily know what I had. I also had many opportunities to shoot people, often candidly with a medium telephoto lens and often with their awareness and permission (sometimes reluctantly). While I don’t usually photograph people, in India everywhere I looked an image presented itself.
Garden and iPhone Flowers
Garden and iPhone Flowers - if necessary, just suspend disbelief. Playing with flowers and apps, and mixing in straight close ups, this gallery has no particular purpose other than the fun of creating it.
One Bear
One Bear - This gallery represents a forty minute encounter with a most curious and cooperative bear we had on our 2023 trip to Arctic Canada and Greenland. Bears exhibit many different personalities, as most will stay distant or relatively still as the ship approaches ever so slowly. Sometimes from initial sighting in our scopes at two or three miles, it can take an hour until a bear is really in camera range. This bear was one of the rare ones that really was curious and and as we approached her, she would move slowly from ice floe to ice floe by jumping and/or swimming, towards us. I was using my OM Systems (formerly Olympus) OM-1 and 150-400 lens with built in 1.25 teleconverter and 1.4 teleconverter added for an effective 1,600 millimeter reach (with the camera’s 2x digital factor) as we approached each other and finally she took us through a bear’s yoga practice.
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