I'm the fat old guy, actually the only guy, in this photograph taken in a classroom at Hyde Middle School in Cupertino, California where I work with kids who have special needs .

This Web page is about sharing beautiful images of nature and making these images available for purchase by the public.  These images have all been taken by me anywhere from my backyard (the dragonfly at the bottom) to absolute wilderness (Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge, Ridgefield Washington below) and everywhere in between. For the last decade or so all my photographs have been been taken digitally. Also, I have lots of negatives and slides from before photography went digital. I will be going through them to select the best images to be digitized and processed through Adobe's Lightroom and  Photoshop, and Google's NIK photo editing plugins to posted on this web page in the future.

My Story

I was born in Philadelphia Pennsylvania, my father was a Captain and later a Major in the US Army and I ended up spending most of my youth in Georgia and South Carolina. 

My Mom let my older brother and I out to play from the time we were five.  We spent our time with each other and/or friends a great portion of the time in the woods, swamps and creeks that were near our houses in both Georgia and South Carolina.   I developed a real love of nature and all of it's creatures and plants from a young age.

In High School I became interested in photography and bought my first SLR  a Kowaflex, to be replaced with a Nikon in college. During those time I was mostly interested in taking pictures of my friends and campus life. 

In my twenties I started camping and hiking in the Southern Appalachians, at first on the Appalachian Trail and later also on many of the hundreds of lesser known  and frequented trails of the Southern mountains. I also developed a genuine  love for the peace, quiet and solitude of solo hiking and camping.  My Nikon, having been stolen out of my graduate school office, I slid back to using film point and shoot cameras.

I met my wife and moved to her native California. My wife is not the wilderness type at all, so I learned to start looking in my own backyard and neighborhood and found a wealth of opportunities to get great photos, as I progressed from digital point and shoots to a Canon EOS 5D Mark II with several lenses. 

Bob Benson