Snowy Egrets at Malibu Lagoon. (Photo by Stephen Berger)
Topanga Canyon nature professional photographer Stephen Berger says he has had a desire to “take, or make pictures for most of my life. My parents got me a Kodak Instamatic camera when I was eight or so, and my prize possession for a years was a photo I took of Evel Knievel doing a wheelie at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.”
His grandpa wished to end up being an effective business professional photographer however, Berger remembers, he “had to stop to get a ‘real’ job as his family started growing.” He likewise has brilliant memories as a teen of his uncle’s cam, “a Nikon film camera, model unknown.”
Berger ultimately gravitated towards nature photography, and 4 years ago he started his extreme concentrate on wildlife photography. “I want to capture and share such images,” he says. “And also I want to go to, and be in, the places where wildlife exists.”
He lives near to large open areas filled with opportunities for recording wildlife images, consisting of Topanga State Park, where mountain lions still roam, Malibu Creek State Park, Malibu Lagoon and Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Reserve.
Asked which of his images is his preferred, Berger remembers, “I recently captured my favorite truly local image — a mourning dove ‘flying to camera’ in Topanga State Park. I can’t say why exactly, but I had a particular desire to photograph a mourning dove flying to camera. … The reason it’s my favorite isn’t just because I captured something I’d been wanting to capture, but because this bird on this morning felt like it gave me a gift. It flew right past my head onto a perch in the only sunlit spot available — and then flew right toward me. But I missed focus and it circled around, landed on the perch again and again flew right toward me. That time I got it — and it then flew off.”
Still, his total favorite is an image he never ever took. He remained in the Sepulveda Basin last fall where a dark morph hawk — a red-tailed hawk almost black in color — had actually made its short-lived home.
“I had a particular desire for the hawk to fly right at me from its perch across the pond. Crazily, it wound up doing so.” he remembers. “It could have gone anywhere! But I decided to not lift my camera to my eye. Instead, I experienced this magnificent creature flying toward my head and then going directly over my right shoulder and through a hole in the flora behind. It was thrilling. The sight, sound and feeling of that hawk flying right past my ear is irreplaceable.”
For more info: stephenberg.net or IG @stephen_berger.
