ARUNDEL – As I walked through the woods surrounding Kevin Byron’s home in Arundel, his commitment to his craft became evident. He has a path with bird feeders placed at intervals, which are crafted out of rustic, found pieces of wood, some with bark (for suet to be rubbed in), all in an effort to attract the birds he photographs. The dappled light on the floor of the forest lends a serenity to this place where he creates. When talking about the birdfeeders around the house, he said that “his house is much like a blind with windows, familiar to hunters, but he shoots pictures of birds instead.”
Byron is a self-taught photographer who picked up his first camera back in 1971. He started to photograph everything, experimenting along the way and eventually landed some jobs with newspapers in 1973. He was interested in bird photography from the start, but he also had contracts with many local papers here as a way to make a living. But the passion for photographing nature stayed with him, as is evidenced by the many books that he and his partner, Monica Russo, published over 40 years. She did the writing, and he did the photography. They worked together on five books related to nature. As educators by accident, they spent a lifetime spreading the word about appreciating the nature that is all around us.
In his early years, Byron used 35mm cameras for his work, changing over to digital in 2008. When asked the pros and cons of digital, he explained that speed and resolution was so much better with digital, thus capturing birds in flight in a millisecond so that the feathers are distinct and clear, and closeups are much more vivid. The con is that in digital format you can lose your photos; he avoids this by storing them in a separate file for future use.
He is especially proud to show his vintage Speed Graphic camera, which was “your basic press camera from the early 1920s through the 1950s,” he said, explaining that it was the camera always used in mid 20th-century films by the press, made noticeable by the bellows-like apparatus which held the lens. Byron said that this camera had many lenses, so it could be adapted to any occasion. The iconic picture of the flag raising at Iwo Jima was taken by this kind of camera.
An exhibition of Byron’s photos, entitled Birds of a Feather, is showing through this Saturday, August 15 at the Coastal Ecology Center Gallery at the Wells Reserve at Laudholm, 342 Laudholm Farm Road in Wells. The Gallery is free once visitors pay the regular site admission.
NOTE: This is the first in a series of articles from The Local News on artists who live in our three communities.
