The Photographer of the Month For January is Ray Roper

Personal History

I like to say I've had four careers: Air Force fighter pilot (Viet Nam era), airline pilot (until Eastern Airlines was destroyed by corporate raiders and mismanagement), computer and software sales (until the software I wrote for my own use became a marketable product), and software development engineer (now retired). During all those career gyrations, however, one abiding love remained—the creative outlet of photography. With the advent of digital cameras and their vastly lower cost per image and a decreasing software development workload through aging (both mine and the software's), opportunities for travel to some of the world's premier trekking location were dramatically improved, and along with it the chances to capture and creatively process some striking images became a realistic possibility. So here we all are.

Our Photographic Philosophy

The world's great trekking locations qualify for that appellation largely because they are visually stunning. My goal then is twofold: first to get to see some of those places firsthand, and second to preserve those memories in captured digital images in a manner that does justice to their fascination for us as seen directly. Since human eyes have a vastly greater ability than even the most sophisticated modern camera to see wide ranges of light and dark and extremely subtle gradations of color, doing the scene justice requires some creative post processing. Not, we should hasten to aver, to add elements that were not in the view in the first place, but simply to take maximum advantage of the camera's abilities to produce an image that comes as close as possible to possessing all the rich visual bounty that dazzled our eyes in the original spectacle.

See more of Ray's work at:  http://terratracks.photography