About Richard Mittleman

My interest in and education about photography began in 1968 when while interning in Pediatrics at Los Angeles County General Hospital, my room mate taught me how to set up a darkroom, develop black and white film and make prints. I shot black and white film and spent many hours in my bathroom/darkroom for the next two years.

In 1970 I married and as a bonus became the father to two wonderful children. In 1971 my second daughter was born and my career as a Pediatrician began and as the country song goes, "life happened" and photography went into a long hibernation.

Starting in 1994 I began making an annual trip to visit my parents in South Florida and was introduced to the wonderful abundance of bird life there. I also started seeing many photographers with amazingly large lenses.

I majored in biology in college and was always interested in nature and so it was not surprising that when my love for photography came out of hibernation it merged with my love of nature.

I am currently using two Canon 1D MKII bodies(8MP Digital) and Canon 600/4IS, 400/5.6, 100-400IS, 24-105IS and 17-40 lenses.

My interest in nature photography has taken me, in addition to numerous locations in the lower 48, to Alaska, the Pribilof Islands, South America, Costa Rica, the Galapagos Islands, Kenya, Senegal and Tanzania.

I have had images published in the Pfizer Pharmaceuticals Calendar, the Permanente Medical Journal, The Bolsa Chica Land Trust Calendar, The South Pasadena Quarterly Magazine and in Birders World Magazine.

My images are available for purchase from The RSPCA Photolibrary http://www.rspcaphotolibrary.com/home.php and from Alamy.com as well as from this website.

All animals in my images are wild unless otherwise noted.

I never use digital manipulations to add anything to an image that was not there in the wild. I will occasionally clone out a distracting element in an image, but other than that I only do the usual processing to make an image ready for web posting or printing.