This is a personal website, of photographs made by Raymond A. van der Woning.
Clearly, wildlife photography is my passion. I love all creatures, big and small, and the environment they inhabit. Frequently I make images of landscapes, weather events, and human artifacts (what I call relics) but I don't limit myself to those genres. I just follow my instincts. I love what I do.
Which is to say, I don't shoot weddings. Not ever.
About Me
I grew up huffing the fumes from each issue of my father's collection of National Geographic magazine, a subscription he began in 1968 and which I maintain to this day. Their writers and photographers had a huge impact on how I viewed the world, and still do.
A lifetime ago, I took a job with a camera retailer — ostensibly to stay close to photography. What I got instead was run down the rabbit hole. For dubious reasons, I set the camera down, pursued a business career (away from cameras) and forgot about photography for over 17 years.
Around the turn of the millenium (boy this makes me sound old), I began carrying a small digital camera while I accompanied my daughter on nature walks. It was my goal to teach her not to fear insects, nothing more. She got over her fear of bugs: I got bit by the photography bug, again.
On the Web
I began publishing images to the web on a traditional blog back in 1998 or so. I went through several iterations of design and domain and ended up here. I am taking a break from publishing new images here, as it is cumbersome to maintain, even for an old hand like me.
Currently I have a flickr photostream, where you can comment on images (providing you are also a Flickr member), and where you can view the images in a slide show format. Flickr offers you and I a way to interact with images in a way only possible here with databases and automatons, things I prefer having others maintain for me.
You can view all of my images at http://www.flickr.com/photos/photographi-ca/.
Note to Self
“My work is done on the street, my work is done 99 times out of a hundred in places where I can’t control anything. I can’t control the light, I can’t control the movement, the environment, I can’t control the clothes people wear, I can’t control anything—and that’s fine. That’s OK. So what I have to do, I have to be in the middle of these uncontrollable elements and I have to simply make my selection.” — William Albert Allard, National Geographic Photographer