Pat O’Hara is a Nikon Legend Behind the Lens

Pat O'Hara had to go far from home to really appreciate the surroundings of his boyhood. True, his first interest in nature came from those surroundings—as he says, "one of the most influential factors in my life was that I was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, in the midst of mountains and national parks and forests"—but it wasn't until he was half a world away from that environment that he realized how important it was to him. "I was in Vietnam in the late 1960s, at the Air Force base at Cam Ranh Bay," Pat says, "and my roommate, who was from Kansas, received care packages from home every month, and inside the packages were nature magazines. His parents were active naturalists, so he was getting National Wildlife and Audubon, and I looked at the photos in those magazines and I just escaped into them."

He doesn't underestimate the importance of those photographs. "Here I was in a war zone, and I was looking forward to my roommate's packages because these magazines had these lovely photographs, and it was an escape for me. I just started dreaming about being out of the military and having some kind of profession relating to nature. And, of course, at the time the photography was so impressive to me."

So he bought a camera and began taking pictures while on R&R. "It was a basic rangefinder, but I started photographing pretty seriously in terms of composition." Later Pat was assigned to Korea, where he was able to use the darkroom facilities at an Army base adjacent to his Air Force post. "That's when I really got into photographing. It was all black and white then, and I'd take the pictures and process the film myself. That was the aesthetic starting point for me."

Today Pat is one of the leading environmental nature photographers in the world. His photographs have been featured in over a dozen books, in countless magazine articles and on calendars and posters. Among his numerous awards is the New York Art Directors Club Photography Gold Medal and Communication Arts magazine's Award of Excellence.

Throughout his career, a constant has been the precision of his composition. "Precise composition has always been a goal of mine," he says, adding with a laugh, "It's probably one of the few areas of my life where I have any precision." To achieve this goal, Pat takes special care to make all the pictorial elements fit together, "so the pictures don't appear to be too busy, which can be tough when I'm working with a wide-angle lens."