anyway and that it's almost a reflection of a reflection looking at reflected image itself i have a real fondness for richmond pond i have a real champlain lots of different brooks and rivers and the different features of the landscape and the things that surround them really intrigued me and captivate my imagination and i found as i travel that there are particular things that strike me maybe not as similar to those things from home but strike me in a similar way as being important to the landscape and i guess as an example this reflection from a place in sweden that was on the far side of a bridge and i was on a bike ride and a little bit nuts in that i packed all my camera gear into a backpack and i put it on my back and i'd go riding around with twenty or thirty pounds of gear in my back because i don't want to restrict myself to not having what i want and i came across the bridge and i saw this just spectacular reflection it was really blue sky and you know way it reminded me of the kind of reflection that i might get off of richmond pond where there are times when the blue sky and clouds are reflected just so clearly that i can almost turn my world on its head and see things in that in that perspective so i do a lot of wildlife photography particularly birds and it's more recently been an interest of mine to try to capture reflections of birds in a way that really highlights the particular features of the bird that i find most interesting whether it's the color or the wing structure or body shape and sometimes having that reflection really allows almost a better and handsome view of how the bird looks and what its features are i think i got the photography bug when i was a little kid and  gift i got a little brownie your brownie knock off camera i guess it would be medium format one twenty millimeter film and i just started photographing so when i got to i guess middle school and into high school i started taking more photographs paying more attention to light and i was in middle school on a trip to new york city with with my school and ice started to notice reflections really and i was just really was struck by how they are a one hundred story skyscraper could be reduced to a single pane of glas but it was during is the end of my or at the end of my undergraduate studies that i picked up my camera again and really started shooting again and i did some traveling with with my wife and we went all over the place across country and then zealand and australia and really really enjoyed taking photographs there and that really restored my interest in it in two thousand and seven i had the opportunity to go on a volunteer research project with earth washington and for that project i invested in time recording data for a lion research project into a ton of photographs and really like the learning about how to do that wildlife photography and getting somewhat better at that and then back home i must have been in burlington when i saw a whole bunch of people marching with the baton flag wearing lots of what looked like to  clothing and it turned out to be the vermont to baton association maybe marching it was their first march to montpelier they marched from burlington to richmond and they camped out at kemah something of a school and then the next day i shot some photos of them on their march towards montpelier and then following them the next day to tropical storm irene when i was taking lots of photographs of that and happened to be taking some photographs of the same scene that of photographer who had been sent there by the free press was shooting we talked afterwards and compared some photographs and encouraged me to send the photographs in that started my my brief career as a freelance photographer for the free press i bid on the  documentation job the construction documentation job for the checker house bridge and got that job so i spent more time than either any of us thought photographing the bridge and that's mostly because it took longer than anyone thought and i'd also did some photographers of the bridge street bridge project i really like this is a a santa claus in montreal and one of the things that struck me about him is that he just seemed really worn out and there's just this sort of inner conflict about you know santa claus is supposed to be jolly and all those things and he's just worn out he's smoking a cigarette and just looked like he would have liked to have been almost anywhere else and but he was there and something about him being there and also not really there because he didn't want to be and as we walk past i caught the reflection that existed in the in the storefront and i found an angle where i could be out of the out of the frame and have him in the frame and then found that when i had him when i was out of the frame he wound up being framed by the reflected arch then pond photographs the first one just really struck me as it was almost a georgia o'keef like image and it's the only one where i really i boosted the saturation of the colors a lot because they just seemed more open and that really interested me because as i was looking at the photograph there  was looking at the image at gillette pond they were something about what i was looking at the that struck me and i couldn't put my finger on it at the time and it wasn't until i turned the image on its side that i realised that it exactly what it was and then the other two they just jumped right out at me there they're close ups of leaves reflected in the pond and i just screen heron which i shot in billie's i was just blown away by the clarity of the reflection and that the bird remained so still and we were probably maybe thirty feet away from it and it sauce at first and it took notice of us but then it when we were still and it went right back to hunting the most recent photograph which was from the flooding down in jonesvill january is this the photograph of the harley which is from the motorcycle shop the harley that hangs on the wall and it's the first time i've ever noticed the reflection of the harley and the way the light caught it was really quite pretty and i wound up producing it in black and white my my primary camera now is a five the mark two i shoot with either twenty four to shoot with a one hundred four hundred zoom tend to have both of them with me wherever i'm going i also still have the thirty body one of the things that i like about reflections is that i can often get an image either without the subject knowing or from an angle that gets a different quality from the subject with the santa for example i think he would have done something different from what he did if i had put the camera his face or if i had said he might if i take your photograph i spent a fair amount of time shooting without looking and some of that comes from doing some sports with august where in order to get an angle on something i've got to hold the camera up here and i can see the viewfinder i can spend hours in the same spot watching and waiting for the the thing to happen that i want to have happen when you get the image and you know that you've gotten whether it's the video shot or it's the photograph there's something very special about it it's i think of it as being not at all dissimilar from hitting that perfect harmony or having just the right combination of notes in a piece of music where may play the same thing over and over and over again and then there are only a few times when it is just so pitch perfect that it strikes you as being this is right and i love that i love it really that's really special