Hello Everyone:
My name is Maria Koropecky and I'm a writer and photographer.
My last name, Koropecky, means cherry-picker-basket-maker in Ukrainian and I grew up in a Ukrainian-speaking household. My father was an officer in the Canadian Navy and as a result my family has lived in many different cities around the world: from Halifax (where both my brother and I were born) to Victoria, Toronto, Ottawa, Washington D.C. and even as far flung as Honolulu Hawaii and Brussels Belgium. And thank God for cameras, photos, scrapbooks, journals and photographers to help me keep track of my life experiences.
Taking a photography class at Langley High School in McLean Virginia (one mile down the road from the C.I.A. headquarters, by the way) was my first formal introduction to the world of photography. To learn how a camera works, I made a pinhole camera which was the only homemade camera in the class that actually produced a successful print first time 'round.
I also worked on my high school's award-winning yearbook — the biggest lesson revolved around taking only unposed shots of the students — hard to do because most people freeze themselves when they see a camera focussing on them. And another lesson imprinted in my memory from those days came during a weekend field trip I took to the University of Virginia. I can still see the classic campus on that sunny autumn day — with the brightly coloured leaves scattered on the grounds among the white Colonial buildings, students with backpacks walking by. We went for a photo-journalist seminar and the advice from one of the teachers was, “When taking pictures, look for the unusual midst the usual.” Of course unusual means different things to different people, but the phrase has served me well over the years. I personally like to look for a “certain slant of light” as Emily Dickinson said in one of her poems.
After high school, I attended the University of Western Ontario. My love of photography came into play in an assignment in my Romantics class. We had to combine one artistic medium with writing and for me photography was the obvious choice. Because William Wordsworth's poem, the Prelude was filled with beautiful, natural imagery, I decided to look for real life scenes that matched his words and then I caught them in black and white photographs which hang framed in my dining room today. I trudged around the Gatineaus (on the outskirts of Ottawa) one Saturday (as Wordsworth might have in England) through thick snow, and my Peterpan-getaway-boots didn't keep my feet dry so I caught a miserable cold — but it was worth it.
I can't talk about photography without mentioning my Uncle Borys who is a huge camera buff. He has photography equipment that will blow your socks off and has been taking pictures of my whole family for ages. Two years ago, he got married at age 59 for the first time in his life to his girlfriend of 30 years (also a first-time bride at 58) (there's hope for me yet!) and he asked me to take pictures of their wedding. Of course I said yes and as a thank you he gave me this awesome Canon digital camera which I use pretty much every day. You might even catch me driving around town with one hand on the steering wheel and the other one holding my camera ready to catch an unusual moment before it passes me by. Is that legal? Anyway, I'd much prefer being able to say, “I'm so glad I have my camera with me” rather than “Darn, I wish I had my camera!” As a friend of mine used to say, “better have it and not need it than need it and not have it.”
Over the last few years, I've been running my business, Homespunspa. It's a service which reveals spa-style recipes for sleep and beauty using naturally-occurring ingredients. I consider the book I wrote, How to throw a home spa pajama party the Homespunspa way, the crowning achievement of that business venture.
And I also focus on photography. I sell greeting cards and photo enlargements and I specialise in taking pictures of plants, pets and people, capturing each in their own casual splendour. It's all about appreciating nature's abundance and the aim is to encourage people to look at life through spa-coloured glasses (now that I think of it, much like the Wordsworth series I mentioned earlier).
I estimate that I have taken over 8,000 photographs over the last 20 years but my favourite subject, is my black cat, Charlie. I could take 8000 pictures of him alone.
I'd like to wind things up with a quote. Rachel Carsen once said: “The lasting pleasures of contact with the natural world are not reserved for scientists, but are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of earth, sea and sky and their amazing life.”