It’s a striking, forward-facing view of the owl as we normally never get to see one up close in the wild. Its watchful yellow eyes gaze directly back at us out of a pristine white face above a detailing of feathers, light snow swirling all around the owl as it sits perched in a tree in muted surroundings of gray-brown tree branches and touches of green against a cool winter sky.
Capturing the image “was a chance thing,” says Warg. “I couldn’t believe I was seeing what I was seeing.” The setting was Steve’s Lane in Gardiner, around 10 a.m. on a wintry morning. Warg has only been taking photographs on a regular basis for a year or so, he says, and had just started carrying his camera around with him all the time. “I had dropped my daughter off at a dance class, and left her there to go get a cup of coffee, which I rarely do, and when I came back around the corner, there’s a snowy owl sitting there.”
The owl was actually on the ground when he first saw it, says Warg. As he quickly started snapping pictures (several of those images are on Warg’s Facebook page at “Owl Ridge Studios”), he realized his camera settings were off. “I had to quickly change my settings. He took off and flew up into a tree. He gave me maybe 30 seconds before he flew off.”
Another memorable photograph by Warg is one he took last winter of the Walkway Over the Hudson, seen from the shore, depicting a diffusion of snow coming off the side of the roadway into the river below, with chunks of ice floating in the Hudson under a dramatic cloud pattern. It reads as that particular kind of beauty found when you combine the forces of nature with industry; Warg says that several people have told him it looks like a locomotive going over the Walkway.
Like the owl photo, it was another chance opportunity, says Warg, shot on a morning when he’d gone down to the area before beginning work for the day (Warg’s full-time job is as a surgical technologist at Mid-Hudson Regional Hospital of Westchester Medical Center — formerly St. Francis Hospital — in Poughkeepsie). “Occasionally I go down there and look to see if there’s a boat going by, or the sunrise, but that particular day nothing was going on, so I got back in my car. Then I heard this noise, and when I turned around to see where it was coming from, I saw this snow cascading off the Walkway, and I realized they were snow-blowing, and it made this beautiful effect as it came off. I just started snapping away and it turned out to be one of my favorites. I was there at the right time.”
Warg is modest about his photography, claiming he’s just a hobbyist, although he does acknowledge that many people in his life have been encouraging him to start exhibiting and selling his work. “A lot of people have been telling me I should, but I’ve only been doing it for about a year seriously. I’m not 100 percent confident in my abilities, yet, but I’m ready to move in that direction.”
Many of his photographs are of scenes in nature that arise from his liking for going out into nature and walking, just shooting what he sees. He often has a sidekick with him, his almost-five-year-old daughter, Emily, who ends up in many of the photos, too. “She loves going out with me to take pictures,” Warg says. “We go on adventures together, hiking in Minnewaska, all over the place.” Son Jeremy, 15, used to like to do that too, Warg says, “but he’s gotten away from hanging out with Dad at his age.”
Originally from Kerhonkson, Warg moved to New Paltz after marrying his wife, Tina Warg, who is a hair stylist at Tressol-mi salon in the Village of New Paltz. David has been in the healthcare field for over 20 years, 15 of those in his present line of work. A surgical technologist is the person in the operating room, he says, who, when the surgeon says “scalpel,” hands it to them. “I’m not physically assisting the surgeon, I’m involved in setting up the cases and handing the instruments to them. A lot of people don’t know about this job, but we’re an intricate part of the team in the O.R. to help the patients to a good outcome.”
Warg’s photographs will be in the windows at Manny’s Art Supplies, 83 Main Street, for the first three weeks of June. He can be contacted through his Facebook page at Owl Ridge Studios. “Photography is something I just like to do,” he says. “It makes me feel good when people tell me, ‘hey, that looks great, good job.’ I’m critical of myself, and there’s a hundred pictures I won’t put up [on Facebook], but I really do it for fun. I was so excited when the owl picture came out — that’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing to just walk up and see a snowy owl. The excitement of getting a nice picture, or turning something that you see into a picture and it comes out the way you want it to come out? That puts a smile on my face. And that’s all I really need.”
