My African Safari with Dr. Martin Evans

We are excited to welcome our very own President, Martin Evans as our August speaker to tell us about his recent African Safari and share some of his outstanding photos.

Meetings are held in person at
Unity Church of Bon Air
923 Buford Road
Richmond, VA

6 p.m. Doors open for socializing
6:30    *Zoom launches for networking
7 p.m. Short business meeting followed by a Presentation or Image Evaluation

*Email Membership.CCRVA@gmail.com to request the Zoom link.

A Word about Our Presenter…

Martin Evans trained as a vascular and general surgeon in New Orleans. He joined Surgical Associates of Richmond in 1998, after practicing in Richmond’s west end for 20 Years. Shortly thereafter, Surgical Associates hired a new general surgeon named Venkat Santosh who had training in India and New York and had practiced in New Mexico.

It was common (actually a requirement) for each of us to do medical case presentations to the surgical conference within the hospital. However, we both noticed that within our presentations, there were several nicely presented photos! Digital imagery was in its infancy, and we struck up a discussion about the conversion from film to digital imaging. Both of us were thirsty for a perspective about this conversion.

Martin quickly learned that Venkat was a loyal Nikon user but had not decided which digital system was for him. Martin purchased several point-and-shoot cameras and eventually decided that Canon was perhaps ahead of the other companies at that time for interchangeable lens systems and decided to go with the Canon system. To this day, they remain cheerfully competitive about their Nikon vs. Canon systems.

Venkat had traveled the world much more than Martin, and Martin thought that Venkat’s travel and photo experiences were beneficial to their photo learning. Since Martin had never visited New Mexico, they decided to take a photo-committed trip to the southwest. They quickly became the “Odd Couple” in that Venkat is a vegetarian and Martin is a carnivore. Their backgrounds are as far apart as one can imagine, but their passion for photography is the same. The technical aspects of digital imagery and the post-processing techniques are quite similar.

After their initial success with the first photo travel experience, it was clear that the conversion of photography from a “solo sport” to a “shared experience” was very valuable to both of them. Over the past 20+ years, they have traveled on a photo-committed event at least annually. These have included locations such as the Canadian Rockies, the Dolomites of Italy, Africa, and Patagonia. They often say that they travel to many places where their wives would not go. They firmly feel that this shared experience produces inspiration and enthusiasm – and yields value and benefits from relationships developed within an organization such as CCR.