by Lisa Sciortino
Robert Shreve has been to places and seen things that he knows most people on the planet never will.
It is a fact not lost on the international award-winning fine art master photographer, whose Shreve Fine Art Gallery opened last year at The Star in Frisco showcasing what he describes as his original “contemporary photographic fine art.”
With his camera, he has captured images of breathtaking waterfalls in Iceland, fiery sunsets amid the soaring mountains of the southwestern U.S. desert, humpback whales swimming serenely in the sapphire blue waters off of Hawaii’s coast, and countless others.
“I like being in remote places that are rarely seen and rarely traveled and (to) pick up on the beauty of the nuances of those places,” says Shreve, who has photographed on five continents.
“Photography takes me to places I probably would never otherwise go. How many people say, `I’m gonna go to Greenland’? Not very many. … I’ll go to a remote part of France that nobody really travels to. That’s what I like to do. I like to pick up on the environment, pick up on the culture.”
Iceland, he says, is one of his favorite places to photograph. “It’s very remote. … It’s a beautiful place and you can just travel for hundreds of miles and not see another car or another person and yet there’s all of this beauty.”
Early Experiences
Growing up in the West Texas city of Odessa, Shreve was a staff photographer for his high school’s yearbook. Following college, he had a successful career as a certified public accountant and currently owns and operates a technology company based in McKinney where he now resides after two decades spent calling Frisco home.
In 2005, he revisited his love of photography and soon began traveling the world in pursuit of images (Shreve prefers not to use the word “photos” to describe his work).
Throughout his life, he has photographed a variety of subjects but says he “really developed a passion for landscape and wildlife.” (Shreve’s work can be viewed at shrevefineart.com.)
Certain elements are necessary to call an image photographic art, he says. “It needs to be regal. It needs to be grateful. It needs to be timeless. It needs to be hopeful. It needs to be remote and be uplifting. Those are the six components that I look for before I even get the camera out of the bag.”
Getting the Shot
Shreve frequently charters helicopters, which provide an ideal vantage point from which to capture images.
While wearing a four-point harness and a tether, “I’ve shot over New York City literally sitting on the seat with all of the doors off the helicopter shooting above the Freedom Tower,” he says. “I’ve shot in New Zealand out of a helicopter. I’ve shot over the Great Barrier Reef out of a helicopter. … That’s probably my favorite thing to do is shoot aerials out of helicopters. It’s very exhilarating. The moment you take off, it’s quite a rush.”
Shreve typically travels two to three times annually. This year, he plans to visit Greenland for the first time and revisit Iceland. Eventually, he hopes to photograph the western coasts of Australia and South America. The trips “require a lot of planning.”
Nevertheless, there are times when “I’ll travel thousands of miles to get someplace and the environment isn’t right (or) the scene isn’t there or there’s inclement weather,” he says. “You may get yourself there, but it doesn’t mean that God is going to give you the picture. … It doesn’t mean he is going to give you this beautiful sunrise or this beautiful sunset.
“A lot of times, I’ll get someplace and it just doesn’t happen, so I’ll have to go back. There are places I’ve been to four, five or six times and still have not gotten what I wanted to get because it’s just not there when I’m there.”
For example, Shreve says, “You can’t just say, `I’m going to go shoot a sunrise over the Grand Canyon.’ You may go to the Grand Canyon 10 times and not get a good sunrise. … There’s timing and luck involved. You have to be at the right place at the right time, but you also have to have a little bit of luck that God gives you this incredible scene to capture.”
Shreve — who shoots with a high-end digital camera system manufactured by a Danish company called Phase One — certainly was in the right place at the right time during a two-week road trip across the northeastern U.S. when he and a friend stopped at Vermont’s Lake Elmore. There they found a few homes tucked amid a forest of vibrant fall-colored trees dotting a shoreline that was mirrored on the water.
“We drove up on this scene and I … couldn’t get the (camera) equipment out of the bag fast enough,” he recalls. The resulting image, aptly titled Fall Lake Reflection, garnered Shreve a 2018 Epson International Pano Silver award.
Shreve says when traveling in search of images, “My goal is to bring something back .. and get it in front of people where they can see it for themselves and enjoy it. They may never get there, but they’re going to get to see it.”
Lisa Sciortino is managing editor of Frisco STYLE Magazine.
