I began this journey to becoming a photographer when in high school, between my junior and senior years, I spent a summer in Germany as an exchange student and lived with a family for ten weeks.

My father bought a camera for me to take along and I brought home 300 slides of my experiences there, mostly 700 year old village churches.

I went on to work as a yearbook photographer when I started teaching and mostly enjoyed shooting the football games. I had an uncle who was into photography and he helped me look at photography as art in the late 70’s in black and white.

It was these early years that I wanted to recall when I moved to Florida in retirement and decided to try photography again, only this time in digital format.

I was enthralled with the birds of Florida mostly and started taking shots in my backyard along the canals of Rotonda West and began printing them in large format to frame and hang in our house.

As I improved I started yearning to have my own tent in an Art Show and sell my work to others wanting to have a piece of Florida on their own walls. This forced me to develop a more critical eye so I joined the Englewood Camera Club and took every advantage of the opportunities there to improve my knowledge and skill.

I have since expanded my interests from just birds to many local icons and Florida landscapes that others may enjoy as much as I do. I like rich, dramatic colors and design my pictures to be even more beautiful than what might have been originally seen by the eye; more how I remember it in my mind’s eye.

I began to really believe that “Everything around you can be a piece of Art.” After all, this is Paradise.

Robert J. Schmitt