Teaching nature with a camera

Way back in the early '60s, while employed as a Naturalist with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI), I found that I had a talent for teaching.

I would have turned that into a profession if I could just comprehend math and chemistry. Unfortunately, those two subjects are, to me, some kind of magic that my colleagues use to grasp their science with greater understanding. So, for me, a "Naturalist" is a biologist who flunked math and chemistry.

What got me through the front door of OMSI was photography, my "Holy Cow! Gee Whiz!" approach to the world around us, and the ability to grasp the fundamentals of the sciences through osmosis. Consequently, I had a lot of fun teaching the art and discipline of interpreting nature, and getting paid for it. That's what "Success" is, by the way: Doing what you want to do, doing it the best you can, and getting paid for it.

Photography is a grand tool to use when teaching the basics of natural science; for example, I'd shoot a photo of a beautiful beetle, and then spend hours helping children and adults to comprehend how said beetle fit into the Big Picture, and eventually what that means to you and me.

That's what helped me to build up and conduct some fascinating science programs with OMSI over the years. In fact, after slide programs people would often say, "You should write a book," and I finally did; it's titled, "Tales from a Northwest Naturalist." My first little cubic Mac with it's primitive word processor and Caxton Printers over in Idaho made it possible.

So, here we are, almost 50 years later, still teaching, still taking pictures, and still loving it. And now, we have the magnificent digital camera! What a money-saver that apparatus is! Remember film? Remember what it cost to buy film and have it processed back in the Good Old Days?

Digital cameras have a "card/disc" that stores electronic information that becomes a visible image, and with the digital camera comes the awesome "delete" function. Had that option been available on film cameras, I would have saved thousands of dollars over the years. That wonderful "delete" function is also one of the things that makes the digital camera such a marvelous teaching tool.

Last week, Ali Ludeman (short for Alexis), a lovely seven-year-old young lady, came up to me on a butterfly trip and said, "I would like to learn to shoot pictures, will you help me?"

How could I say no? My legs turn to peanut butter when that happens, and besides, I have two digital Canon Rebels, so why not...? The one I loaned to Ali had a 300 mm telephoto lens on it for shooting things far away, so I sat her down, gave her the basics, handed her the Canon and away she went.

Ten minutes later, another seven-year-old, Siena Long, decided she too wanted to get in on the action. Well, I had one more Canon, so again, why not?

What a day! We went from using a telephoto to a wide-angle lens, and then to macro and on to the use of the strobe. By mid-morning, Ali and Siena had accumulated hundreds of very good photos of everything around them (often in triplicate), including Ali's self-portrait.

But just before noon, Ali said, "Jim, the camera won't work." Turned out she had filled the card. As we started looking at her work I noted the triplicate shots of one scene, so I showed her how to use the "delete" function and suggested she let up a little on the trigger finger.

From then on, Ali and Siena knew what to do when the "full" image appeared; they'd delete what they thought weren't up to their standards, and start shooting again. (Oh, how I wish I had been able to "delete" before I spent all that money processing those thousands of fuzzy, out-of-focus images on slide film. I'd be a millionaire!)

If you want to enjoy life more fully, and the opportunity comes into focus, take a child by the hand, teach her/him the fundamentals of photography and respect for the equipment, then turn the child loose with a digital camera.

Not only will you come home with images that will conjure up all those wonderful hours you spent with a curious child sharing the world around you, but you can delight - as I do - with the digital camera's money-saving "delete" function.