For 56 years photography has been a quiet, personal passion unencumbered by the pressure to exhibit or sell my work, hence most of it has never been seen by anyone. Today, I share.

Observing life is an art. With camera in hand and a Zen mindset, I occasionally compose and capture an enduring picture. Weeks, months, even years after taking a shot, I will revisit that print with a more objective eye. Memories of place, surroundings, atmosphere, circumstances and people flood back as there is now so much more to see. Each photo must meet my own subjective and fluid criteria. Is it aesthetic? Does it ooze a special aura? Does the face reveal emotion? Is there humor or whimsy? Is it absurd? Is it unique? Is it good? To each onlooker, the answers are different.

For more than 40 years I shot in black and white using a twin-lens Rolleiflex – a fine, relatively heavy, medium-format, manual camera that produces exceptional 2-1/4 inch square negatives or slides. Each roll of film offers only 12 exposures before I have to reload. Traveling with dozens of rolls and the Rollei posed so many problems when passing through security at airports, both foreign and domestic. X-rays could ruin weeks of work, while overly curious security people sometimes insisted that I open every box of film and demonstrate that the camera was real by snapping the shutter or opening the back! About six years ago, these challenges ultimately forced me to leave my Rollei behind in favor of a very small digital camera and my iPhone. To be a good photographer, one must master techniques, understand light, composition, focal depth and a myriad of other things that become so deeply ingrained that the process of taking the picture becomes completely spontaneous. All that matters is the image.

I am inherently curious and aware of my surroundings and told that I notice things that others do not. To me, nature is sublime. I may be one of the missing Transcendentalists from the 19th century! Some ever-morphing categories of my work include street scenes and street people, indoor shots, abstracts, nature, landscapes, objects, animals, portraits and even a rare self-portrait. But these genres are hardly pure and usually overlap, blending and creating other hybrid groups.

One measure of a photograph's appeal is whether it provokes a reaction. The visceral chemistry that sparks between the image and the observer is deeply personal, the moment when image and life communicate."

Dick Eger has degrees in biology and chemistry, bacteriology and public health. He attended St. Peter's College, Wagner College and was a researcher at The Rockefeller University in a cell biology laboratory. He was a biochemist at Sloan-Kettering Institute in a leukemia research group and later became the administrator of Sloan-Kettering Institute, the research arm of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

More than 30 years ago, he changed careers and became a financial advisor, currently co-heading a group at the investment firm Merrill Lynch. For 20 years, he was a trustee on the board of The Arts Council of the Morris Area (now Morris Arts) and president for almost half that time.

His interests include music, piano, conducting, drawing, sculpting, garden-jewelry-and-furniture design, blogging, cooking, sailing, writing poetry, photography, frequenting concerts and museums, traveling, mentoring, gardening, collecting art and contemplating life.