Gulls at Adobe Resort and Cape Perpetua: Yachats 4/13/01
It was a wonderful trip to this great spot. The second photo is Cape Perpetual, near Yachts, on the same day.
Posts Tagged ‘Bird Photography’
Mart Barber Shop display
A number of years ago, I was asked by this great institution to provide some bird photographs and a few landscapes as a permanent display. Many celebrities and others have sat in these chairs to have their hair cut, and still do to this day. Of course, sharing the stage with Marilyn goes without saying. 
Visitor Center print pickup at The Icon
Luis Diaz of The Icon, my printer, kindly took these photos of me as we put the prints together for my show next July at the Santa Monica Mountains Visitor Center; but we need some prints for Bird Fest 2015 where I’ll have a table December 5 at the Visitor Center courtyard.
The visitor center is administered by the Western National Parks Association, which is a nonprofit education partner of the National Park Service. The exhibit is at 26876 Mulholland Highway, Calabasas, CA 91302.
Me and Kris Ohlenkamp in the field
This great bird man is a dedicated educator and contributor to conservation. We took a walk today at the Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Reserve. Thanks to Ann Ohlenkamp for taking the photograph. 
Recent fieldwork at Sepulveda Basin
I don’t get into the field much these days, as I photograph mostly in my backyard, but my friend Peter Barash took these photographs of me at my favorite nature reserve in the LA area. 
How much is a photograph worth?
I was speaking with the assistant manager of my local eatery this morning and she told me some very important things about photography and displaying photographs as I was asking her input about pricing these unlimited, signed 6 x 9-inch prints for the Santa Monica Mountains Visitor Center exhibition next July, and the idea is to make them affordable for folks, and I said, well, why are people willing to pay thousands for a mediocre oil painting or acrylic at a fashionable gallery, but don’t want to spend a few hundred for a great photograph, and she said, well, people take their own photos and they think it’s easy, and they don’t realize all the work that goes into bringing a photograph to market, such as editing the raw footage and getting rid of the blurred shots or the ones that just miss, all of that it very labor intensive; all of the hours that go into taking the photos, standing there, waiting for just the right moment; the photoshopping and post-production work that goes into it; then there’s the printing of the photos and the framing, not to mention signing and numbering them. So you see it’s not just that someone pressed a button on the camera and you can print this out any number of times, but what kind of effort went into all of it to get it to that point, and I would argue that maybe photography is at least as difficult than painting in that you have thousands, hundreds of thousands of photos, you have to cull that down to the best ones, etc., and maybe a painter can produce a certain type of image in a smaller amount of time than we think, but since we can’t do it, we think it would take days and days to paint a landscape. Someone once asked a writer how long it took to do a book or whatever, and he was, say 50 years old, and so he said, 50 years. It might have been Hemingway.
