NASHUA – The art of photography was something that Chris Bower always had an interest in, but the proverbial flash of the bulb didn’t come until after he had graduated college and moved to Texas with his wife Jennifer in the early ’70s.

“That’s when I started getting serious,” he said. But it wasn’t until 2009, when he and Jennifer went on an east African safari.

“I came back with what I considered to be some very nice wildlife photographs,” Bower said. “That’s when I took it really seriously. There are a couple of the pictures that I really liked, and my friends liked them too. I’ve actually made five trips to Africa in total, one to Iceland and one to Italy.”

Bower said that he and his wife had decided a long time ago that if they could afford it and had their health, they would travel.

“We went to Egypt, scuba diving in the Red Sea,” he shared. “We were supposed to go to Australia and New Zealand two years ago, but Jennifer was becoming ill with kidney failure. So, we cancelled that trip.”

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A miracle happened, according to Bower, on New Year’s Eve, 2019, when she received a new kidney

“She’s doing fantastic,” he beamed. “But this COVID-19 thing isn’t helping any. She’s stayed mostly indoors. But’s she’s doing very well. Talking to her, you’d never know there was a problem.”

Bower has kept busy during the pandemic by working on his photography, going through photos and tinkering.

Recently, he dove into learning Photoshop, a photo editing, image creation and graphic design software.

“I’ve been making composite photos,” he said. “Some of those are combining images from Africa, from Venice, some local. The images in my composites are from different years, taken in different places.”

Both Photoshop, and Lightroom, the latter which is a cloud-based service that provides the skills to edit, organize and share photos across any device, have kept Bower occupied.

“When we got back from that first trip in 2009, I went to a meeting down in Massachusetts, I think the speaker was John Shaw, and he was doing a talk on photography,” Bower said. “From there, I learned about Lightroom and in the 2010s, then when I really got into it. It’s been wonderful. I enjoy the challenges.”

While showing and exhibiting his photography has been a challenge of a different kind during the current health crisis, Bower did win second prize at the Greeley Park art show last year. And he just won first prize at a show in Portsmouth.

“That’s a photograph that I was exhibiting among all these paintings,” he said. “To me, I couldn’t believe that actually happened. The funny thing about it is that two of my friends let me know ahead of time. One sent an email congratulating me. But I didn’t get my letter in the mail until three days later, stating that I had actually won. I was leery – should I post this on Facebook and brag about it to my friends? I was afraid if I did that, it would come back to haunt me!”

Bower said that as he began to explore his photography, he focused on what he referred to as “natural abstractions.” He said he gave himself the assignment to concentrate on this particular area of expertise.

“I had taken some photos several years ago up in the Great Bay area,” he said. “I was looking for blue herons and I saw some interesting rock formations on the side of the bay up there. And so I took some pictures of them and one of my photography friends on Facebook challenged me to post some abstracts.”

Bower now has three different images of three different subjects that he’s put together in that category that he labelled, “natural.”

“I have one, which is fresh rocks, another is ice crystals, and the third is from my last trip to Africa,” he said. “We did a helicopter ride over the sand dunes, and I selected three images from that to go in that series.”

With COVID-19, exhibiting his work has been problematic, but Bower said he has entered a few competitions, such as the one in Portsmouth in January.

“They have another one going on right now,” he said. “I’ve had two images accepted there. So, I have to deliver those the first part of August. And there is one in Plymouth, Massachusetts, but I don’t believe they’ve accepted anything yet.”

That will be a virtual exhibit, in that they will only be accepting one entry per artist or photographer. Bower is hoping that the Greeley Park show will still happen. (It’s slated to run August 22 and 23.)

“I need to get my act together and apply for that,” he said. “And the one that I’ve always done well with is the one in Keene. But they shut that one down in May which kind of surprised me that they made that decision so soon.”

Two years ago, Bower did well at a show in Woodstock, Vermont, but not as good last year.

“I would drive up the day of the show and set up my tent,” he said. “At the end of the day, I would lock things up, drive home and head up the next day. Last year I thought I would try again this year but gauge the first day and then make a decision on whether I’d do the second day.”

Hollis also has an indoor show in early November in which Bower believes he’ll participate, having had success there in the past.

Bower said he hasn’t really changed equipment very much, staying close to what he knows and prefers. He has two mirrorless, combination cameras.

“I don’t like the screen on the back of a camera so much,” he said. “I prefer the view finder.”

Unlike some photographers, he doesn’t necessarily go everywhere with his camera but met a friend last year who has gotten into bird photography, in which he’ll join in.

“I love nature, I love color,” he said. “I’ll take pictures of the sun filtering through the leaves of the trees. Stuff like that. But for the most part I don’t go wandering about with my camera. I really like to have something in mind that I’m going to shoot.”

This past winter, Bower and friends went to Boston and he shot some abstract images of buildings reflecting off each other.

“I’m interested in anything and everything,” he said. “But it really has to strike me. For instance, with the composites that I do, I don’t have something in mind when I take the images. I’ll see something in that image, and that will precipitate something else.”

“The first one I did was several years ago in Fort Stark,” he said. “A bunch of us went up to take pictures of the full moon rising and the lighthouse was off in the distance. I had a long lens, 500 or 600 mm and I got these shots of an orange moon after it had come up.”

When he reached his car, he saw his friends up on some rocks still shooting, so Bower grabbed a different camera with a wide angle lens and shot another photo.

“I put those two images together,” he said. “It turned out to be a very interesting photo. And that’s how some of my others worked.”

Bower recalled an image by National Geographic photographer Franz Lanting, from DeadVlie, a white clay pan located near the more famous salt pan of Sossusvlei inside the Nambi-Naukluft Park in Namibia, Africa.

“A friend planned this trip and when we ended up there,” he recalled. “We walked up this little dune to this place where there is no sand. It’s got a white base to it with these dead trees – hence the name DeadVlie. It’s white there because it used to be a swamp.”

That original Lanting photo looked abstract to Bower, who couldn’t believe it was a photograph and not a painting.

“I couldn’t believe I had gotten to the same place,” Bower said. “It was a big surprise to me.

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