About

I am a retired experimental physicist from Los Alamos National Laboratory since 2013, and have remained in Los Alamos, New Mexico since I stopped work. My research involved basic science projects in collaboration with laboratory colleagues and university professors. Sometimes, I led the collaborations. Most of the subjects studied involved very rare phenomena that shed light onto extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics and the evolution of the early universe. While the technical aspects of photography like optics might seem like a natural match to my background, the artistic aspects of photography, e.g. composition, interest me more.

My wife, Beverly, also became a photographer in 2013. Traveling to remote parts of the world is much easier when your partner shares your interest. We have three children and four young grandchildren. Our oldest girl is a fine artist and website designer. Our youngest daughter is a special effects artist working in the movie industry; you may have even seen on of her movies! With two artists in the family, advice on what works is often available.

We travel about three months per year, broken into two long trips to someplace remote, and some short trips near home. Thus, there are roughly as many images from North America as from the other 5 continents combined. We have skipped Antarctica due to a propensity to become motion sick. The majority of our trips are to capture wildlife images. Some of our trips feature “cultural” photography, which we define as pictures of people dressed in their indigenous costume performing some everyday task like winnowing rice.

How remote a place have we been willing to visit? My favorite answer is Torajaland. See if you can guess where it is before you type it into your browser’s search engine.

We have little time to be bored. Planning travel, going on trips, and post processing images makes photography nearly a profession without even trying to make any money from it. A typical month long trip produces about 10-15,000 raw images. During photo shoots, we are usually up before dawn and return after dusk with a rest break in the middle of the day. This schedule matches the times when animals are the most active. It does not leave time for more than a few photographic chores like backing up images to disk. Hence, processing the images does not start until we reach home. The post processing usually takes about 1-1/2 days per day in the field, so we relive the trip for a long time after our return. Our photographer’s eye sees more than regular tourists, and we get twice the pleasure of enjoying the trip a second time. If you count slide show presentations, that is three times.