My first architectural photography was in 1961, at Mayan ruins of Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico. These photos in my high school thesis won 1st price in thesis ranking and that helped get me accepted at Harvard. Then in 1962 I was accepted as a student intern by the INAH architects at Bonampak. I later photographed Mayan architecture every summer and projects noticed this so the University of Pennsylvania project at Tikal asked me to help them for an entire year (1965). So architecture of Tikal was one of my major contributions (here are samples from many decades ago). I then did my Harvard undergraduate thesis on architecture of a burial pyramid at Tikal.

The FLAAR Photo Archive of pyramid-temple, palace, acropolis, ballcourt architecture of Mesoamerica is one of the 10 largest in the world. We would like this to be in a museum or university digital resource when funding can help catalog, pack, and ship the “tons” of 35mm Leica, medium format Hasselblad, 4x5” and 8x10” Linhof photographs.

Since I came from a family of architects I did fine art giclee style photography of architecture (HOK Architects that came after Hellmuth, Yamasaki and Leinweber), plus two brothers, grandfather and great-uncle were all architects (mostly in St Louis, Missouri)).

The photographs in this portfolio are from before 2008. In those early years I did fine art giclee style photography of flowers.

But in the last decade we do botanical photography of flowers and all other kinds of flora of Neotropical Guatemala, Central America. We had a project at Parque Nacional Yaxha, Nakum and Naranjo from August 2018 through July 2019. This was recently expanded to a 5-year project permit (2021-2025) to photograph flora, fauna, and ecosystems in the entire Reserva de Biosfera Maya (RBM). Simultaneously we have been going to remote areas of Izabal, Guatemala for a 15-month project for the Municipio de Livingston. Those photos are in PDFs mostly on our www.Maya-ethnobotany.org. The present PDF is photos of fine art giclee style.

The flowers with water petals were in front of my university office in Ohio when a snow storm hit in Spring (after warm Spring weather had opened up the flowers). Most of the other photos are taken in Guatemala, Central America.

This portfolio starts with panoramas of volcanos that ring Lake Atitlan, in the Maya Highlands of Guatemala. These were taken with a Dicomed and BetterLight large-format tri-linear scanner digital camera with a 4x5” camera and Rodenstock or comparable lens. It took about an hour to set the camera up, set up the Mac laptop computer, do the test shots, adjust all the settings.

And then take 29,000 individual photos that the software automatically blended into a panorama. In that decade Adobe Photoshop could handle only 30,000 pixel rows, so that set the limit to 29,000 individual vertical pixel photos.

The next four photographs are of The Sinks and Sinking Creek, on the Hellmuth family farm in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri. A few months ago (in mid-2021) I sold my share of this farm to other relatives since I need the funding for our multiple projects of wildlife conservation, flora conservation, and endangered bio-diverse ecosystem conservation research photography projects.

Then photos in EU, then “panorama” of Spanish colonial architecture in Antigua, Guatemala.

Next a panorama photograph from the balcony of my apartment in Guatemala City back in those past years (while I was a research assistant at the Museo Popol Vuh, Universidad Francisco Marroquin, Guatemala City).

The final photo I estimate is from when I was a consultant in digital imaging technology as guest visiting professor at the cultural heritage institute of the University of Malta.

The brightest and most diverse colors come from Highland Maya handicrafts from Chichicastenango and Antigua Guatemala. But I have of course also found bright colors on the boats of the Island of Malta (from when I was consultant to the university there decades ago).

I like to photograph anything and everything that is old and worn out. So aging wood as fine art was one of my photographic hobbies in past years. One reason was that on our family farm in the Missouri Ozark Mountains, we as children played with my brothers and sister in the old wooden barns. But decades later these barns are even more “aging” and thus more photogenic.

Also I found and photographed wooden doors, window frames, in Greece and islands nearby. I have also photographed the 8^th century wooden lintels of palaces at Tikal and other Mayan ruins, but this wood is so strong it is not as “aged looking” as a barn on a farm. So I don’t show any of the wooden lintels here.

In the late 1990’s, a friend said “Nicholas, I notice you are an experienced photographer. But I also notice that you are not doing anything digital. I will provide FLAAR with a $100,000 donation if you will ‘go digital’.” So, obviously, “I went digital”, throwing aside all my old Leica and Nikon cameras. The three Hasselblad cameras could still be used with digital backs (until recent advances in Phase One backs that work better with a Phase One camera and special lenses).

The same time that I received the donation, a professor who knew my photography skills got a Japanese government grant for me to fly to Japan and teach the curators and staff at the Nacional Museum of Ethnology (MINPAKU) about digital scanning, etc.

Our reports on digital imaging attracted manufacturers to send me advanced technology equipment for FLAAR to evaluate. The late 1990’s Dicomed could take a photograph of over 250 megabytes. So we needed a printer to produce these photographs at one meter height (3 feet) by 3 to 5 meters long. So Encad donated a printer so we could test it. The results were so amazing that when we published them, all the other printer manufacturers noted how our test-prints were so eye-catching. So for the next 20 years (1999-2019) we were provided with printers, inks, scanners, cutters to test and evaluate (over a quarter of a million dollars in equipment). Digital companies flew us to their research labs and factories around the world. Digital expos flew our team to their trade shows. Total travel in these years was close to 2 million miles (3,218,688 kilometers). FLAAR had over 19 employees testing digital imaging and printing equipment (and software, etc.) at two universities simultaneously (BGSU in Ohio and UFM in Guatemala City). About two million dollars in funding enabled FLAAR-REPORTS to become one of the literally top 10 wide-format inkjet printer evaluation programs in the world.

But gradually more and more entities asked our help to study biodiverse ecosystems in remote areas of Guatemala and to accomplish high-res photography of these endangered biomes. So since COVID caused printer trade shows and expos to be cancelled, we at FLAAR (and FLAAR Mesoamerica in Guatemala) have been doing field work deep in the swamps, marshes, and rain forests of Izabal and also Peten areas of Guatemala (that we show on our www.maya-ethnobotany.org and our other websites).

Plus we have been writing children’s books on pollinators, birds, butterflies, jaguars, bio-diverse ecosystems for several years. Our team is also producing animated videos for to help Mayan children in remote areas of Central America learn about wildlife conservation.

All our projects together have more than 28 people working. We are producing even more during 2020-2021 than in past years since we have more experience and with mirrorless cameras we have better equipment for using deep in the jungles.