Nottingham’s pictures draw people to the outdoors in a way that draws attention to beauty in subtle forms, from a bluebonnet growing out of a rare spring snow to the outwardly stark landscape of the Big Bend Ranch State Park. His works depict the beauty of everyday things others tend to pass unnoticed. Yet, he is able to translate the scenes onto paper in a way that makes the viewer wonder how they could have missed them.

“Drawing people into the outdoors is part of my work in photography,” he says. “Yes, if there was ever a photographic mission, that is it - an appreciation of the outdoors.”

A Temple native who has lived here for most of his life, Nottingham has been head photographer for the Texas Parks and Wildlife department for the past 12 years.

“It’s a constant struggle to get people to appreciate the outdoors and conservation as a whole,” he says from his home in north Temple.

“All you’ve got to do is go out on I-35 and see how the concrete is expanding and we’ve got fewer places to go to to rest and enjoy nature,” he says. “I’m all for progress, but we also have to have a place where you can dip your feet in cool water and enjoy the sounds.”

He remembers his first spark of interest in photography. He was a 10-year-old growing up in the house he still lives in today.

“My brother brought a camera back from Germany,” he says. “I shot up his roll of film, going around and shooting all of the neighborhood cats. He wasn’t happy when he got his film processed and had to pay for 36 pictures of cats.”

Nottingham continued shooting, working on the Temple High School paper and, after attending a number of photo schools, working at the Temple Daily Telegram in 1974 to 1976.

Fellow photographer David Hansen, photography instructor at Temple College, has known Nottingham for years and has convinced him to speak to a number of his classes.

“I admire his work and admire his work ethic,” Hansen says. “His style is quite a bit different from my style, but I enjoy him coming out and lecturing to my students.”

He said Nottingham’s breadth of knowledge of the state has benefited him in his travels.

“Two years ago when I was going to go down toward Big Bend, I called and asked what to do and where to go. I saw things I never would have seen had it not been for him,” he said of the circuitous route Nottingham recommended to him.

Although Nottingham lived most of his years in Temple, he spent a couple of years in the Pacific Northwest, an area rich in scenery, and a place that served as a transition in his photographic career.

“For years you take your home and your local area for granted,” he explains. “Photographically, I took Texas for granted. You got used to everything and nothing much changed.”

Through the beauty of the Northwest, he began to find a greater appreciation of the place he had left.

“I found myself really missing the little things back in Texas that I had always taken for granted,” he says. “It could be a bunch of scraggly mesquite trees against a winter sunset … or the blackland grasslands.

“That really deepened my appreciation of Texas. When I came back it was like seeing things with new eyes again.”

After returning to Texas he dived into photography, transitioning into magazine photography by getting his foot in the door with Texas Highways Magazine.

“From there it just kind of snowballed,” he says, leading to his years at Texas Parks and Wildlife, a job that has taken him to some of the most beautiful places in Texas, including trips to every state park.

Pointing to a large map of Texas on his wall in his office at home, he says, “Every time I pass by this - it boggles my mind - this is my office. This is my cubicle.”

He says that nowadays when he is not working, he takes pictures of his and his wife’s children and their dog and cat.

With anecdotes of his travels ranging from being peed on by a mountain goat - “He was up on a bluff and I was photographing up at him” - to marveling at a single drop of water on a single bluebonnet, his travels have helped him experience things many people go through their lives never seeing.

“Just being there for a sunrise or a sunset up on a mountaintop and there’s nobody around for a quarter million acres - it’s awe inspiring,” he says, referring to a trip to Big Bend State Park on a photo expedition.

But his philosophy of the pictures he makes remains as it was when he first started shooting neighborhood cats with a pilfered camera.

He points out a framed photo hanging in his living room as an example. The picture is of a Mexican woman in a tent in subdued light that he shot during a mission trip to Mexico.

The woman’s face is partially lighted from sun streaming into a tent during a prayer meeting. She was a grandmother, the leader of her community, and had led a spiritual life, he says. After a hard life of living on the border, she looks to be about 70, but Nottingham says she was only about 50 at the time he made the picture. In the picture her hands are raised toward her face in prayer.

“If you show someone a picture of a place where you have been, that’s nice,” Nottingham says. “But if they can look at a picture and feel what you were feeling at that time - if you can translate that feeling into a picture - I think that is the measure of success for a shot.”