James S Mattson, PHD
Specialties
In 1983, I started a law practice in the Florida Keys and continued my interest in underwater photography. Between 1988 and 1991, the Caribbean was adversely affected by an unexplained die-off of spiny sea urchins. The urchins were the primary scavengers of algae on the coral reefs -- and suddenly they were gone. So were future photographs of the coral reefs. In 1992, Rana and I made a trip to the Cayman Islands, where the reefs were still spectacular. However, the Florida Keys reef tracts have still not recovered from the late diadema dieoff. We have since shifted our photographic interests from underwater to above-water. In 2012, we posted some photographs we shot in France when between 1994 and 2009. We have also visited several US National Parks over the years, and will get to those when time permits. In 2011, we traveled to South Africa, where we shot more than 5,500 photos of lions, giraffes, rhinoceros, zebras, leopards, penguins, and numerous other species. We have uploaded some of the best shots, in our South Africa collection.
