Laura Gooch

Laura writes of herself:

I am a civil engineer by training, and I practiced civil and environmental engineering for about twenty years. Although my interest in photographing the natural world began when I was a teenager, it did not really catch fire until the late 1990s, when I took a break from engineering and began to photograph birds. Since then, my interest in studying birds has expanded to include recording and studying bird song, and I have become fascinated by macro photography of insects.
Looking at the world through a telephoto or macro lens focuses attention on a small piece of the larger whole. When I photograph a bird or an insect, I try to use that isolated focus to move deeper into the animal's world – to understand and portray what it is doing in that moment and gain some insight into its reality. The ability of the camera to take me farther into the essence my subject and to share what I see there with others is what keeps me coming back to photography.
Human beings take up an ever-increasing part of the earth with our presence, our structures, our activity, and our noise. Technology allows us to ignore the ecological space that gave us birth and the creatures that have an equal share in that space. I hope that by offering a window into moments of other creatures' existence, my photographs illuminate the reality and fragility of the other lives that always flow around us.

Editor's note: An interesting fact about Laura... She grew up in Fort Worth, and when she was about 12, her mom was involved with the Texas League of Women Voters in the effort to preserve The Big Thicket. She says, "We went on a bus trip from Fort Worth to The Big Thicket area. I don't really remember much about the trip, except that there was this kind of neat guy with a guitar on the bus -- Pete Seeger!"
Cheers to that mom who fostered in her daughter a love of the natural world and the notion of preserving it, too!