Asked if he’s a professional photographer, Temagami’s Doug Adams laughs and says, “When would I find the time?” The answer shouldn’t be misconstrued as meaning his work is amateurish; it’s anything but — just check out his stunning shots on these pages and on our cover.
It’s simply that Adams is too busy running his inn, searching out wild orchids to photograph, teaching others the wonders to be discovered with a lens, working his trapline, trekking all over the northern landscape and enjoying life in general to devote any more time to his craft than he does now. “I do it for fun...and have fun doing it,” he says. “But I wouldn’t turn down a contract with National Geographic if they came calling.”
Born in Windsor, Adams moved up to Temagami in 1986 after tiring of living a trucker’s life. “I was reading a magazine one night and saw an ad for an inn up for sale,” he explains. “I put in an offer. Days later I owned it, and that’s when I thought, ‘Geez, what have I done?’” It was obviously the right move; Adams and his wife Margaret can’t imagine living elsewhere.
It’s also been a boon to his photography. Never without his camera, “because you can’t take good nature shots if your camera’s sitting on a shelf back at the house,” Adams has a knack for fi nding beauty in the strangest of places. “If I go ATV-ing, I take my camera. If I head to the dump, I take my camera,” he says. “Lately I’ve been infatuated with wild orchids, to the point I go out and search for them. They’re absolutely beautiful.”
Ask him about his cameras and he can go on. “I started out ‘way back then’ with a Brownie 127 roll fi lm box camera, then a Kodak drop-in fi lm cassette camera. My fi rst 35 mm was a Pentax Spotmatic, then I got my fi rst real good 35 mm Minolta and added lens after lens all the way up to an 800 mm mirror lens for that camera,” he explains. “Wanting better resolution, I bought a professional Mamiya RB-67 that uses 120 roll fi lm and has 6 X 7 cm negatives that are over 4 times larger than the 35 I had been using. I fought the digital concept as long as I could but fi nally relented about four years ago and bought, at that time, the best camera available. Today, it’s a dinosaur but I still love it.”
Adams has taught countless non-credit photography courses at St. Clair College in Windsor and also as a satellite course for North Bay’s Canadore College. “I taught that at the lodge here, all about simple composition and technique,” he says of the course he held years before the digital camera boom. “How to compose a picture, how to use a tripod and filters, that kind of information.”
“I like taking pictures and exposing people to really close-up macro-photography of things like a dragonflies’ eyeballs. Then there’s the wild orchids, some of which the plants can be three feet tall,” he says. Thus far he has documented 19 different wild orchid species all in the Temagami area. With work published in various contests and calendars, Adams has no intention of putting his cameras down any time soon.
He’s also worked on wedding photography for years, “as long as the dates don’t interfere with (his) fi shing plans.” For this man from Temagami, photography is all about the enjoyment. “I just want others to see common everyday items from my perspective.”