One obstacle stood between Wendy Seagren and her dream of becoming a police officer, and she still hasn’t gotten over it.
“There’s a 6-foot wall you have to scale, and I just could not get over that wall,” said Seagren of Camas. “I didn’t have the arm strength to climb it.”
That was a few decades ago. Seagren, now 65, instead went to work as a claims account executive. The job allowed her to do a lot of investigating, which is what originally drew her to an interest in police work. After working in the insurance industry for almost 32 years, Seagren retired in 2000 when she was 50. Then she had to figure out what to do next.
“You get to the point where it’s like, ‘OK, I’m home today. What am I going to do with the rest of my life?’ ” she said.
After she retired, one of Seagren’s sons gave her a camera. She immediately took to photography, and started taking classes at Gavilan College in Gilroy, Calif., where she was living with her husband.
Seagren has spent a large portion of the last 14 years behind a camera, and recently earned a bronze medal at the Professional Photographers of America’s 2015 International Photographic Competition. She submitted four photos, all of which earned merits in the competition and will be shown starting in January at the Georgia World Congress Center.
She also recently self-published her first book, “Portraits of Light: One Photographer’s Journey Through the Seasons of Yosemite.” Seagren primarily shoots landscapes, and said she visits Yosemite National Park at least twice a year. The book shows Seagren’s shots of Yosemite throughout the last 14 years, and she writes about shooting in different seasons and all the differences in lighting that comes with each one. Her favorite seasons to shoot are spring and fall because of all the changing color in the trees and leaves.
“As I learned more and more, I learned that photography is about the light,” she said. “You can take an average photograph, but if there’s something special about the light, then the photo just comes to life.”
The book-making process wasn’t without some terror, though. About halfway through, Seagren accidentally deleted her work, about 16,000 photos and everything she wrote to that point. She was using the book module in Adobe Lightroom and tried to capitalize the word “photographs” in the program, but as soon as she did it, she saw all her photos go offline, and eventually, disappear.
“I was so stressed,” she said. “I didn’t sleep. There was a lot of hyperventilating.”
Luckily for Seagren, one of her neighbors worked for Adobe and put her in touch with one of the company’s programmers. Five long weeks later, Seagren had her work back and finished her book, which is available for purchase, along with other photos, at her website: www.thruthelensephotography.com.
Seagren added that her family is a bit in awe of her work as a photographer, especially since she was never one to spend time on hobbies before.
“I didn’t even know anything about a camera,” she said. “I worked in the insurance industry and worked a lot of hours, and had kids and kept up with all of their extracurricular activities. This is my new profession in what I thought was retirement.”
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