When I was a child, young, around 6 to 8 years old, my family and I (that is, my father and my siblings except my youngest brother who I had not yet come to know existed and my mother, since my parents were divorced when I was 4) would go on brief family vacations to a place called Parc Safari. It was just a day trip to Montreal I believe, or some place in that area (coming from Ottawa), and in retrospect the place was an abomination, restless bored animals pacing small compounds while people gawked from their car windows, at least for a portion of it. I can only remember bits and pieces: the sight of a giraffe's head over a fence, a lion in some obscure environment, hyenas, and some large lizards somewhere. What I remember and enjoyed the most were not the animals. I love animals, don't get me wrong, but I hate seeing them in captivity. It's like strolling through an operational prison and pointing at the inmates: "Whoa, look at that one! He's got really intricate patterns all over his back. And he's huge!" I've never been fond of zoos, circuses or anything like them (with the exception of those facilities designed for the rehabilitation and repopulation of endangered species).

No, what intrigued me most was not the confines of the animals, or the sorry shadows of lions and leopards lying on rocks, as they must do day in and day out until they die; rather, it was the cameras we always got when we went there. That was the big highlight for me, though I had not yet come to understand my passion for what I was doing. My dad always used to buy my siblings and me a long, flat camera, of what design I have never known the name. It looked like a gaudy version of the mini spy cameras we see in the movies these days, shaped like an elongated cell phone. He would buy me some extra rolls of film and I'd snap away with zeal.

This passion would lie dormant for some time, only arising and facilitated by these family excursions to the animal prison. Sometime around the age of thirteen or fourteen, while remembering our trips to Parc Safari, I suddenly had the revelation of what it was I treasured so much in those memories: the camera, the film, the flow, the thrill. I talked to my dad about it, and he encouraged me to pursue it, and to get a more professional camera.

He started me on a used Pentax which quickly proved too bad to use. We traded it in for a Nikon EM5 because it was a semi-automatic camera and would not overload me all at once at the beginning. It was a great camera and served me well for a long time. But, then I came to the point where I wanted to get more control, to become more refined, and basically look more professional. After all, the pros, in my mind back then, do not use semi-automatic; they use fully manual cameras. So, my dad and I returned to the same camera store and exchanged the EM5 and some extra money for a Ricoh that was fully manual.

My dad also lent me his Tamron 70-210 zoom lens, feeling I was old enough to know how to use it properly, a presumption that would become the cause of his dismay after some time. In the meantime, I cherished the lens and the camera.

At this time, I was living in a house with my mother and my older brother in a place called Millar's Corners. It was a fairly nice house, for us anyways, with a large yard, two cedars by a big window in the kitchen, and nestled up against a calm wood and a small stream. I was in grade ten at the local high school, and although I was achieving well above-standard grades (mid nineties), I was having problems with my attendance.

I used to skip school, feign a sickness or whatever it took to get me out of that white-washed institution, so I could sit, poised and motionless, in front of that window in the kitchen where the big cedar was, and where, from the lower branches of that well grown tree, hung bird feeders. I sat and waited, for hours, for the birds to come, chickadees, sparrows of all sorts, nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, finches and a myriad of other species and genus's of birds. My main quarries were the cardinals, especially in the winter, and I always secretly hoped for the indigo bunting of my bird books to come fluttering into my reality one spring day while I was out and ready, but they have eluded me thus far.

Every second week I would bring my collection of exposed film with me to my dad's apartment in Ottawa. We would go down to the Shopper's Drug Mart in the strip mall nearby and drop them off and pick them up later, maybe after grocery shopping. Later, we'd bring the film to the new Wal-Mart in the South Keys mall (South Keys, obviously, being where he lived, in a building called Saratoga Place). We'd also pick up some new rolls for me to use around the grounds of the apartment building(s), which had bike trails, a pool, a tennis court, a path through a small, wooded stream, and most importantly, a duck pond. I used to only go to the duck pond to feed them, but then I would go to lure them close for the camera. After we got the rolls of film back, we'd go home and I'd patiently wait for my father to finish his hurried fingers from whatever they were doing on the computer keyboard, wait for him to finish relaxing, and then we'd go through the pictures one by one. Sometimes we even went out to a couple different places we both liked so he could let me go nuts snapshooting nature.

I advanced slowly, not because I wasn't good, but because that's how photography moves. Film photography, anyways, and for me particularly. I took the pictures and then I waited a week to see them. When I saw the image, I would be primed to remember everything going on while I took them. Every roll had at least one shot that was so terrible I had to learn from it, and one that seemed above my usual skill that I would fixate upon and try to improve. Evolution, thus, was slow, but inevitable.

Eventually, I moved to the other side of the window. At first, I left the camera inside while I practised. I went out, put birdseed in my hands, and stood motionless for some hour or two, sometimes in mid-winter, until the birds would come to me. I even caught one by the feet, much to its chagrin and complaining. I dared not try this again, though, because I wanted them NOT to fear me, and catching the one finch caused quite a disruption, not to mention I felt quite guilty afterwards for inflicting so much stress on the poor little thing which had trusted me enough to eat from my bare hand.

Then I started going out without the seed in my hand, but the camera instead. Chickadees were the easiest and most compliant subjects, with their fat faces and merry tunes, they never seemed anxious at all. It was more like "Hey buddy! How are you...Hey! Where the hell's my bird seed? Ah well, this feeder's good enough...So, back to you, what's going on man?" But the cardinal always eluded me, and even to this day I am still hunting for a decent photograph of one, though I have not actively tried for some years.

My friend, Jeff Coleman, more of a brother than a friend, was also an avid bird-watcher, and joined me on many adventures into the woods around his and my house (wherever my house happened to be, as my family moved around within the area quite a lot). We spent days hiking, days in trees, days in wait trying to find rare birds, and we did to some extent. There aren't many rarities in southern Ontario, but we happened upon a few Pileated Woodpeckers from time to time, Scarlet Tanagers, which aren't rare but aren't common, and other kinds of not-so-common birds like Baltimore Orioles, Bobolinks, and Rose Breasted Grosbeaks. Jeff, once, without me, spotted a Snowy Egret (though I saw one later on a drive back home from Kingston), and I, once, without him, spotted (perhaps) a Golden Eagle (it could've been a turkey vulture, except the head was not bare and there are variances in the white marks on the inside of the wing of an adult vulture and an adolescent Golden Eagle), and we both witnessed a Bald Eagle fighting an Osprey while fishing in some northern lake with his dad, Kerry Coleman. His companionship greatly helped to keep me interested during this critical growth period in my photographic life.

In grade eight, I started a photography club with Jeff and a very nice, lovely girl named Erica Sampson who would become, with the help of some strange providential mystic, another with whom I felt a sincere and lasting kinship (though that history is another story altogether). Our Physical Education teacher, Mrs. Cooper, who now lives just down the road from me, was an avid photographer, mostly portraiture, who had her own studio at her ranch house in a place called the Sugar Bush. She took us around Oxford Mills and Merrickville a few times, and another tour of her own property, and taught us some of the fundamentals, though I had already known about half of them. I remember all of them, but there is not much point going through them all. They were definitely beneficial.

But sometime in high school, after we had moved out of the house on Millar's Corners, I left my camera, with the Tamron lens attached, sitting on my dad's tripod. Somehow, perhaps the dog knocked it over; perhaps it fell under its own weight, the tripod tipped over, and the lens mount on the camera and the lens bent. The lens was rendered useless, and the camera as well, and were both not worth the repair costs. Thus, there was a period of maybe a year when I did not have a camera to use.

Both fortunately and unfortunately, my father's failing eyesight got to the point after this year that he decided he no longer could see well enough through the viewfinder. He bought a small digital HP and passed on the legacy of his equipment to me, which I still bear proudly and extremely protectively. It included a Nikon FM2, a Nikon 135mm lens E-series lens, a Nikkor 50mm, a Nikon E-series 28mm, a Cokin filter system including red, blue (81B), yellow (Y1), and orange, a sepia, a diffuser, a mist filter, and a spot-in colour filter. As well, he passed on a circular polarizer, a set of Vivitar macro filters (+1, +2, +4 dioptics), a Vivitar flash, and a cable release. He had a motor drive, but it had long since broken down of its own fallible design. Though by no means a grand and expensive set-up, I am satisfied more deeply by its sentimental value and the legacy it represents. If "mother is name for God on the lips of children", as Brendan Lee so eloquently states in the movie The Crow, then father is the name for Hero.

I have since expanded upon this set-up, and continue to do so, adding a 4 point star cross filter, a neutral density filter, the 170 and 173 Cokin varicolour filters, a new set of Hoya close-up filters (52mm) +1, +2, +4, the Nikon 5T and 6T close-up filters, and a Sigma 70-300mm Apochromatic Zoom lens.

All the pictures featured thus far on this sight have been taken with this set-up for which I am forever indebted to my father, David J. Baxter, my mentor and provider. I have also to thank Jeff and Erica, for sharing in my enthusiasm back when I was beginning, my mother for taking me out to so many places to take photos, being so patient with me, and keeping Brandy out of the shot, my cousins Chris Duguid and Robin Rutherford Baxter for making my trip to England and Scotland not only possible, but one of the best trips I've taken, to Jeff's family for inviting me on so many trips, and Emily Fitzpatrick, Alison Kellar, Cynthia Siming Zhang, Josh Brown and the crazy Russian Ilya for being so supportive of my photographs (and anyone else that I'm forgetting).