Don Johnston Photos

About Don Johnston

• Don is a self-taught natural history photographer, with a degree in Biological Sciences

• He taught high school biology, retiring after nearly thirty years.

• He's been pursuing nature photography for over twenty five years.

• He has travelled and photographed extensively throughout North America and have studied with such notable nature photographers as John Shaw, Freeman Patterson and Tim Fitzharris.

• He is widely published, with hundreds of credits in magazines such as National Wildlife and Harrowsmith Country Life, calendars such as World Wildlife Fund, Audubon, Teldon and Harrowsmith and books, advertising and other media as well.

• His prints hang in private collections in Sudbury and as far afield as Atlanta.

• Along with noted Canadian photographer Mike Grandmaison, Don photographed the Sudbury book project Healing the Landscape.

• This award winning nature photographer currently lives in Lively, Ontario, Canada with his wife Brenda and son Matthew.

What’s In the Bag?

• Don has photographed in a Digital format since 2003.

• Currently he uses Nikon Digital bodies: D300, D3 and D3X.

• He owns range of Nikkor lenses from 12-24mm to 600mm. Recent upgrades include: Nikkor 16-35 VR, 24-70, 24 mm PC, 70-200 VR.

• Scanned slides were produced from Leica and Nikon film bodies.

What’s on the Desk?

Effective Digital photography demands the competent use of computers, hard drives, scanners and software.

• Currently Don uses Apple MacIntosh MacPro tower and Macbook Pro computers together with a calibrated NEC 30" display.

• He scans with a Nikon 9000 film scanner.

• His software includes: Adobe Photoshop CS4 and Adobe Camera Raw, Nikon Capture NX2, Expression Media (for cataloguing), Helicon Focus, Photomatix as well as Noise Ninja and Imagenomic noise reduction software.

Contests

I rarely participate in photo contests these days. I'm suspicious of the motives of the organizers behind many of today’s photo contests. I feel that many organizers offer prizes to winners in the guise of acquiring a library of royalty free, high quality photography. To me this is ‘crowdsourcing’ and ‘rights grabbing’- with an insistence on acquiring all usage rights from participants buried in the contest entry rules . In the past I was an avid contest participant with some successes as you can see from the list below.

• Grand Prize- 1995 Sierra Photo Contest; winner 1989 Sierra Club photo contest (wildlife division)