I took this picture in Havana, Cuba when the security people at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana (National Museum of Fine Arts of Havana) refused to let me in with my camera. Rather than leaving my equipment in an open cubby, I took a walk around the museum and snapped this shot.

A dear friend has a condo right on this beach. This is the view looking south. Rincón is on the western side of the island, looking towards Santo Domingo.

Costa Rica is an ideal spot for the nature photographer. The rambling landscape is teeming with wildlife. The mountains, rainforests and shoreline offer their gifts. The country is compact so you can travel North to South, Pacific and Caribbean in short order.

Here are some birds I photgraphed . The Collared Aracari I saw in both the Arenal volcano area and the Sarapiqiu rain forest in the North. The Hummingbird is from the San Gerado mountainous central area, and the Ibis are from Dominical in the South central Pacific.

I joined the Club with no real photography experience. I feel I have reached a much higher ability to make good pictures by being in the Club and learning from judges and other photographers who have given lectures. To me, photography is an art that develops over time. The opportunity to take interesting pictures is now one of the criteria for selecting the best location for our family vacation. This year, we picked a photographic safari to Kenya. Following the taking of the pictures comes the real work of making the picture more interesting.

The first picture below was taken from a moving van. One can easily capture the real situation of local people, “hidden” in a moving vehicle with today’s digital cameras. The other two pictures also show the subjects in their actual environment, while I was safely in the same van.