"In my previous life, I devoted the lion’s share of my energies toward aerospace management, which, while busy and productive, wasn’t enough to satisfy the creative force within me and, I strongly suspect, in everyone else as well. Any moment that wasn’t devoted to family was invested in pursuing my passion for photography. I read about it, took classes and spent thousands of hours taking and critiquing shots in order to hone my skills. A timely opportunity for early retirement now allows me to travel to every corner of the globe, cameras in hand, recording what I see and experience on film. My travel and editorial portfolio includes many countries, but my specialty is China, where I spend a month every year photographing the explosive growth that country is experiencing. Ten years ago I was taking shots of people on bicycles. I still take those pictures, but now I have to be careful not to be mowed down by the hoards of electric scooters that are zooming along every street (and more than a few sidewalks)."

"Between trips, I do commercial photography for trade books, most often the quilt books written by my wife and travel partner, Melody, who is a nationally recognized fabric artist. While I certainly enjoyed my working years, I smile at the irony that I was actually spending my 'professional' time preparing for my real life's work, photography!"

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After serving in the Navy, getting a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1955, working in the oil industry for four years, and going to Cambridge, England, on an NSF post- doctoral fellowship, Charles Sleicher joined the Unversity of Washington in 1906 as Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering.

He retired in 1991 after serving 12 years as Chair of the Department. He has been interested in photography ever since getting a Brownie box camera at the age of 14, and he had a darkroom as a teenager. At that time he spent summers in the Adirondack Mountains of New York, where he developed a keen interest in natural history. He has long been passionately interested in both natural history and photography, but not until after retirement was he able to devote serious time to them. In the first few years after retirement, Charles took photo workshops and field trips with Art Wolfe, John Shaw, Pat O’Hara, Joe Englander, Joe and Mary Ann McDonald, Arthur Morris, and the Rocky Mountain School of Photography. Today his photography is concentrated principally on travel and natural history - birds, mammals, reptiles, insects, flowers, landscapes, or almost anything that could be regarded as outdoor photography. His credits include photographs in many calendars including several covers, books, the National Geographic, other magazines, a first prize in Nature’s Best Magazine’s Annual Contest, and exhibits at Meany Hall at the University of Washington.

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Bernie Friel is a retired lawyer and a former partner in the Twin Cities law firm of Briggs and Morgan where, for many years, he headed the municipal bond department of the firm. Bernie was also instrumental in organizing the National Association of Bond Lawyers and became its first president. In recognition of his efforts on behalf of the Association it created the Bernard Friel Medal, a national award, given periodically for outstanding accomplishment in the municipal bond field. Bernie started his career as a trial lawyer in the Air Force and spent his early years in practice with Briggs and Morgan as a trial lawyer. In his “spare” time, Bernie has also served as president of the North American Nature Photography Association, as a former Board Member of its Infinity Foundation, and is a member of The American Society of Picture Professionals.

Bernie suffered a major heart attack at the age of 38 before bypass surgery was available and the medical prescription for his recovery was an exercise program which eventually led him into backpacking, canoeing, kayaking, river rafting, sailing, and mountaineering. On these adventure travels he always carried one or more cameras to record the adventures. However before many seasons had passed, the motivation for adventure travel was photography rather than the adventure destinations. His passion has always been nature photography and even before the adventure travel he was a serious photographer of birds and animals. He has a library of several hundred thousand images in formats from 35mm to 4 x 5. He is one of a small number of photographers who use high-speed flash (1/15,000 sec to 1/35,000 sec) to capture the beauty of the frozen image of a bird in flight.

In the past several years in his quest for images Bernie has led backpacking and raft trips to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, rafting and dorie trips down the Grand Canyon, canoe trips to the Boundary Waters Wilderness Canoe Area and adjacent Quetico Park, crewing sailboats in the North Atlantic, South Pacific, Indian Ocean and Great Lakes, climbs of several mountains, including Rainier and Kilimanjaro trips to central and eastern Florida to record images of Painted Buntings and Barn Owls in flight and to Alaska for Grizzly bears and Musk ox.

His image library also contains cityscapes, historic locations in the U.S. and Europe and landscapes and animals from Africa as well as many images of World War II aircraft taken at air shows in the U.S. during the last 20 years.

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Jerry has had a life-long love affair with cameras and photography beginning long before he joined the Reagan revolution in the late 1970’s. Jerry continued working with President Reagan through the end of his first term. In 1984, When AT&T broke up, Ginsberg got involved in the burgeoning competitive telecommunication’s industry, where he created several long distance services and modernized the old WATS and multi-use T-1. He was also a pioneer in the 10-10 dial around long distance services.

Over the last 15 years he has passionately pursued fine art color landscape photography throughout North and South America and the Middle East. While many photographers move toward digital, Ginsberg goes counter to the grain, in his migration to large format view cameras as he continues to photograph the wild and beautiful places of the western hemisphere.

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