From Bridges To Mating Mantises: Photographer David Warg

By Anne Allbright Smith

From Issue 22: Spring 2014

David Warg has been a surgical technician for fifteen years and works at St. Francis hospital in Poughkeepsie. He enjoys “taking care of people; having a part in helping to have a positive outcome and sometimes a hand helping to save patients.”  

But Dave’s camera is always in the car.  That way he can take advantage of seeing snow blow off the Walkway Bridge in Poughkeepsie (www.facebook.com/owlridgestudios) or catch a Snowy Owl perched not far from the Gardiner home he shares with his wife Tina (The Gardiner Gazette, Winter 2014). The owl caught him by surprise, perched on a stump looking upwards. It seemed quite fake until it moved. Dave has favorite places that he visits frequently because they change every day.  They include the area below both Poughkeepsie bridges, the bird sanctuary near Blue Chip Farm and Awosting Falls.  

Dave has been seriously photographing with his medium range Canon eos xi for only about a year, but the extensive display of photos on his Facebook page includes categories as varied as landscapes, frozen waterfalls, birds, Hudson River sunrises, old metal, wildlife, and old buildings. We at The Gazette first “met” Dave as the author of an article on cicadas last summer. As he explains, he heard them first, then wondered if he could see them and what they looked like. He experimented with his camera  settings and the cicadas played a major role in launching Dave’s photography hobby.  

Dave is often accompanied on his photography outings by his four-year-old daughter, Emily. Emily loves going on these forays with her daddy.  He doesn’t tell her when he has to go by himself and can’t take her for reasons such as rough terrain. On occasion, David can get his 15 year old son Jeremy to come with him too.

A Great Blue Heron enjoying lunch.

Basically self-taught, Dave believes that “you don’t need to go to school for everything.“ You can pull anything up on the internet and study from there. You just have to practice, practice, practice.  If it’s terrible, go back and do it again. Dave often shares his photos with two Facebook Community pages; Hudson Valley Photography and The Hudson Valley are two pages on which artists can share their work. You submit your photos and, if your photo gets chosen for the main page for the day, you can get many hits or—in Facebook jargon— “likes.” He got more than 1,800  likes for his owl photo. “It’s almost like an addiction, and when many people send a ‘like’ to your photographs,” Dave says, “It always puts a smile on your face.“

Dave’s goals are to shoot in 100% manual settings, share his photos with people, and eventually have his own photo show.