About Dave Otto

Photography is an art form to express creative inspiration as well as an effective medium for communication. I live on a small but beautiful creek that flows through Carrboro and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, one of the fastest growing areas in the Southeast.

I have been working for the past five years with a small grassroots organization—the Friends of Bolin Creek—to preserve the creek corridor and adjacent woodlands. I have used photography as a tool to communicate the beauty and importance-- ecological, recreational and historical--of this place in our efforts to educate the public and convince local governments to preserve this natural treasure.

Visit www.bolincreek.org to learn more about Bolin Creek and my use of photography for education and preservation.

My appreciation and mastery of digital photography as an art form and communications medium have evolved in parallel with efforts to preserve Bolin Creek.

I would like to share my skills and growing body of images of the flora and fauna of Bolin Creek and other places around the world that I have visited, as well as the people who inhabit my universe and perhaps yours.

A few words about my approach to photography may be helpful before visiting the gallery. I am passionate about wildflowers and critters that inhabit the woodlands, particularly as seen through macro lens.

There is beauty at every turn in the trail, creek or road we are following through life if we simply stop to look. However there is incredible beauty in nature that cannot be seen with the naked eye, but which can be seen readily through a macro lens.

Moreover, nature is full of amazing patterns and brilliant colors. I am continually searching for unusual patterns and colors in the woodlands, at the beach or on crowded city streets. I am drawn to abstract patterns.

For instance, the creek provides a marvelous mirror of nature. If the surface of the water is calm, one sees a precise reflection of the trees and sky. However, if the surface is disturbed by wind or flowing currents, the reflections become more and more abstract. I am fascinated with abstract patterns such as the reflections of autumn leaves in the creek, the continually changing kaleidoscope of water cascading over rocks, petals in the blossoms of wildflowers, or the ebb and flow of surf on the beach at sunset.

After years of photographing wildflowers, it dawned on me that pictures of people, particularly children, enjoying the creek corridor would be far more persuasive arguments to convince decision makers about the need for preservation.

Over the past few years I have tried to capture images of people of all ages enjoying the creek, woodlands or location where I am shooting. People hiking, riding bicycles or kids swinging on a rope over the creek are far more challenging subjects to shoot than wildflowers, but action shots of children playing in the creek or other venue are very powerful tools for influencing public opinion and preserving nature.

Click here for Dave Otto's professional history.

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