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• 459 Photos
• 308 Loves
• 149 Followers
• 101 Awards

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All

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Elsewhere

• Ray Mathis Photography
• Pbase website
• Motivational-Educational Speaker
• naturesmasterpieces@yahoo.com

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About Me

I'm now a retired health teacher who is also certified in Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT) and who now represents the Chicago Institute for REBT and speaks to teachers, students, and parents for FREE about how to develop "Mental and Emotional Fitness", to not only better their lives, but help prevent all the health, relationship and societal problems that abound. I wrote a book entitled "It's just an event - It's your choice how you want to feel" that describes some simple but important cognitive life skills we could and should be teaching people of all ages, but unfortunately do not. These skills would allow them to get into the best cognitive and emotional places to make the healthiest and most rational behavioral choices for themselves and others in response to their life events.

My other passion (besides my family) is photography. I shoot 4x5" color transparency large format landscape photography almost exclusively. I've been doing it for about 20 years and when I started, shooting large format was the gold standard for that kind of work and something you had to do to compete if you wanted your images published. Times have changed, and most of the big name landscape photographers in the country have gone digital, but I'm still clinging to doing it the old fashioned way. However, it's getting harder to find film and get it developed, so the hand writing is on the wall, not to mention all the wonderful images I've seen here that people have been able to capture using digital, and probably do so with much less effort, and definitely much less cost. I've quietly been developing a personal portfolio of images of "Chicago Wilderness" and other wild areas throughout the country for those 20 years. I make my images available free of charge to all conservation and environmental groups, and other non-profits as a way of giving back for all that I've been able to experience because of others efforts to conserve the natural world and protect the environment we all so depend on, even if some don't realize it.

I sincerely hope that my images encourage you to seek out similar experiences in the natural world for yourself, just as others images have encouraged me to seek out such experiences for myself. Take someone else and a camera if you can, but above all else, GO. And hopefully, after having experienced such moments in your own life, you'll consider joining those of us seeking to preserve, protect and rehabilitate what remains of the natural world around us. As the Sierra Club motto goes, "Explore, enjoy and protect the planet".