Category Archives: Features

Marianne A. Kinzer
Painter and photographer

An Artist’s Use of Photography

As a painter I very much enjoy sketching in nature preserves. I also take photos with a small digital camera of the scene I draw or paint. I like to compare my artistic interpretation in watercolor or pencil with the view through the lens of my Kodak camera.

In search of the original landscape of Illinois, I found Wolf Road Prairie. I like to work there throughout the year. Wolf Road Prairie offers a special atmosphere, an extraordinary intensity of life. Working in the prairie or wetland I feel a great joy of being alive and having the opportunity to observe this undisturbed environment.

Art is free and does not exist to meet economic interests. Art is simply beautiful. In places like Wolf Road prairie nature rests in itself and is not bent to meet our material needs. Art and nature meet here.

Marianne A. Kinzer

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Jerry Kumery
Photographer

Thoughts on Photography

Photography is art or a form of art. I like to set a mood, an atmosphere, a feeling, with my cameras.

I strive to take photographs, not snapshots……there is a difference.

I started photographing in a serious way in 1984. My first telephoto image was taken through a spotting scope in Thatcher Woods of a juvenile Great Horned Owl, high up in a Cottonwood Tree. It was awful, but I still have it to remind me that bird photography is not easy and never to take it for granted.

Bird photography has no limits. You never fulfill all your goals. You never get the ultimate photograph. There is always another behavior to document on film or another species to photograph. The possibilities are endless — birds flying, hunting, feeding, nesting, displaying or swimming.

Jerry Kumery
jjkumery@sbcglobal.net
1-708-485-9215

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