For many years, it seemed as if the only time that I could take meaningful images was when I left home and spent a week or so fully dedicated to photography. In my years as a practicing physician, I often felt as if I needed to clear my head of medicine and the problems of my patients before I could "focus" on image-making. After a while, however, I realized that this approach was far too limiting. Because I rarely could spend more than 3-4 weeks a year away from home, I began to search for something to photograph in my local area that could potentially be important to me as a way of expressing myself. This search began in the late 1980's in Philadelphia, when I began making my first serious graffiti photographs. The streets and walls of many areas of Philadelphia at the time were littered with graffiti, and the schoolyards especially were a never-ending source of this material. I feel that I did some very fine work then, which has continued to this day with my Wynwood, Miami, images. Finding a source of material so close to home was a crucial aspect of my photography, without which, I may have lost interest entirely, since my travel was so limited. Many of these abstract photographs remain some of my favorites, and my newer pictures build successfully upon that earlier work.
Having a photographic image source nearby was wonderful, but my landscape photography didn't benefit much from this approach. While I did do some local landscape work, my heart was often not in it for reasons that I still don't understand, though I do recall one Fall (1994), when I was taking landscape photos nearly every weekend for many weeks. That Fall was exceptionally spectacular, and the slides that I made that year confirm the unusual nature of the color change that literally lit up the region. But it was problematic to find other scenes to photograph, most likely because I just didn't look and work hard enough. The area around Philadelphia was and is certainly attractive and potentially ripe for photography, but my vision at the time was too immature.
In recent years, however, especially since retiring from medicine, I have been able to locate landscape photos nearby nearly every day. Part of this change has come about because of the advent of digital imaging. The instantaneous feedback and the ability to immediately edit photographs has literally opened up a new world for me. In the film era, the time differential between taking a photograph and seeing the finished product felt too long, especially if it was color slide film that needed to be sent away for developing. Now, whether I am using my Nikon dSLRs, or my iPhone, feedback is immediate and provides a superb stimulus to keep me working towards better and more meaningful images. I always have some type of camera with me now at all times, usually my iPhone, the quality of which has become extraordinary. Its flexibility also allows me to make pictures that I would have never even considered in the past. It is one of the greatest photographic tools ever invented. But the instant feedback seems to have been the ultimate spark that lit the fire for local work, and I now make many photos within a few miles of home, sometimes during walks around the neighborhood. So while I still love to travel the world to make photos, I must admit that some of the most satisfying pictures that I make these days are taken very close to home, as seen in this sunrise photo of an Anhinga drying its feathers after a feeding dive for fish.
Anhinga Sunrise, Parkland, Florida 2018