Picture perfect

PAYSON — As a young boy, John Parkinson looked through the lens of his mother's folding bellows Kodak Autographic 2C camera — and fell in love with the world he saw. By age 12, he had built his own light box and was producing black-and-white contact sheets. Photography had become a favorite hobby.

As he was growing up, his parents often took the family on treks through the Rocky Mountains and across the Colorado Plateau, often on day trips from their home in Benjamin, Utah. Parkinson again fell in love with the world he saw. He loved taking pictures of it.

Photography remained a hobby through years of a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, earning a business degree at the University of Utah, marriage and making a living, which he did in the mining industry in Reno, Nev., then back in Payson as a traffic manager, business owner and insurance underwriter.

"I was doing quite well in estate planning and underwriting. Then my oldest daughter got married, and to save money, I did her wedding photos. Soon, the parents of some of her friends were asking me to do their wedding pictures." After a while, he was doing weddings, family reunions and other freelance work.

"I discovered something interesting. In the insurance business, I had to go looking for people. With photography, they came looking for me. That seemed a lot nicer." So Parkinson quit the insurance business and took up photography full time.

That was 35 years ago — and he's never regretted it, although "sometimes I felt guilty that I was making a living doing what I loved so much." Today, his work can be found on product labels, including a line of wine, computer screen-savers, calendars, walls and even as the background of a Visa charge card.

He's had several one-man art shows, including ones at the Springville Museum of Art and the Kimball Art Center in Park City. His prints have hung in the Nikon House in New York City's Rockefeller Center and in the corridors of the United States Congress.

Now semiretired, he still does some commercial work. But he has also put together a book that combines his love of photography with his love of nature — and with one other love, poetry. "Visual Verse" (Synergy Books, $29.95) combines some of his favorite photos with some of his favorite poems — ones he's written himself and others that he's long admired, such as William Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, Lord Alfred Tennyson, William Shakespeare, Robert Service, Joyce Kilmer and others. The book is available in bookstores as well as on his Web site at www.visualverse.com.