The buzz at the recent Tom Peyton Memorial Arts Festival in Alexandria was about the display room of 38 photographs by Jim E. Johnson, a wildlife biologist and wildlife photographer.
Johnson, a 73-year-old Army brat who was born in the Panama Canal Zone, is a husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather, and he and Susan, his wife of 43 years, make their home in Lecompte near LSUA. Susan, a retired home economics teacher from Rapides High, is a bit of a preservationist. You see, she preserves some pictures that he deems endangered.
Honored that Jonathan Peyton, the treasurer of the arts festival, asked him if he’d be interested in having a display of his work, Johnson had to decide which of his voluminous set of photographs to choose for the display.
“Some of the ones I culled, she saved,” Jim said of his wife. “Like the photo of the blackbird under the title ‘You Did What?’”
If you didn’t see it, the male Brewer’s blackbird, captured in Johnson’s photo head-on, while in Colorado, has an expression with those characteristic bug eyes that befits the title in a way that tickles the old funny bone. He captured that whimsical photo with a Canon 500 f4L lens.
Another popular photo in the display – which is redundant, I guess, because they all were popular – was of a “Peek-a-boo Fox.”
“A den of them were playing in the field in my pasture,” Jim said. “I happened to see that one hiding and got lucky with that one.”
Johnson owns two lenses on his Canon camera – a super telephoto lens with a focal length of 500 millimeters, and a lighter weight lens with 100-400 mm zoom length. Both are digital, as expected, but he remembers buying his first film camera, a Minolta, after he retired from extended military service.
Johnson joined the Navy after his 1969 graduation from Glenmora High, and he quickly found himself riding patrol boats in Vietnam, which he did for a year. He also did some time aboard an aircraft carrier and a destroyer escort before leaving the Navy. After doing odd jobs for two years, he joined the Army infantry and spent 16 years of active duty at the Louisiana National Guard Recruiting Office and Armory on Coliseum Boulevard in Alexandria. He retired in 1996 as a master sergeant.
Jim’s father was an Army staff sergeant, and he lived with his folks in Fort Polk and Germany and at Fort Knox in Kentucky before settling in his parents’ native town of Glenmora. While in the Guard, he was a night student at Northwestern State, where he graduated in General Studies in 1985. He later took classes in biological sciences at LSUA and Oregon State.
Along the way, a clarinet player he met in New Orleans taught him the basics of photography. Combining that skill with his lifelong interest in nature, Jim developed a passion for both, in particular avian photography. His work has been published in several calendars, magazines and books.
His photos at the arts festival always draw you into those favorite photographic haunts of his such as the Lacassine National Wildlife Refuge or the Cameron Prairie National Wildlife Refuge or the Louisiana coastlands. But there’s no limit to where he might find a potential photograph – and his camera is always with him when he travels. And he and Susan drive everywhere. “You miss too much when you fly,” he says.
He’s proud of a photograph of a Harlequin duck – a small North American sea duck normally found on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts – during a 2017 trip to Yellowstone. Adding to the rarity factor of the photo, the Harlequin duck is declining in population and considered endangered.
As to his knack for seemingly being at the right place at the right time for the perfect photo, Johnson says, “Sometimes it’s opportunistic.”
It helps that he has a camera that, he says, can take 30-40 frames in a second.
“Sometimes,” continues Johnson, a survivor of sextuple bypass surgery in 2003, “I may spend three or four days in duck blinds to get that one (excellent) photo.
“The key thing is I know the subject,” he went on. “I know where to go to look for something to know where it should be. It’s exciting, and sometimes it’s frustrating.”
His favorite photo of all? He showed me a photo of a bird that is considered the smallest and most beautiful falcon in North America. It is sitting on the tip of a leafless, three-pronged branch. There is a soft white background reflecting a gray, overcast day on Meeker Road in Lecompte last winter. It’s called “American Kestrel.”
“It’s a bird I’ve always been interested in,” he says. “They’re always on light wires and they’re very flighty.”
Winter, he says, is a time when a photographer can catch shots of raptors or falcons. Opportunities for bird shots get sluggish in the summer “like everything else,” he says, but in late summer he looks forward to shooting hummingbirds.
He has twice (2019, ’23) won “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” bird photography competitions put on by an art gallery in Lake Charles.
Yet, he wants to keep photography as a hobby rather than a profession. Why?
“When your hobby becomes a job, it’s not fun anymore,” he says. “This is still fun.”
A treasure of Johnson’s photos can be seen on the Jim E. Johnson Nature Photography web site: jimejohnsonphoto.com.