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E.J. Peiker was born in 1960 in Augsburg, Germany in the German state of Bavaria near the Alps. His family moved to Mansfield, Ohio, in 1969 right before his ninth birthday where in 1975, he became a U.S. citizen. E.J. resided in Ohio until 1979, when he began attending Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana earning a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering and completing graduate studies in Microelectronics and Semiconductor Physics.
For the past 23 years, he has worked for the Intel Corporation in California, New Mexico, Oregon, and Arizona engaged in the production of the microprocessors, chip-sets, and communication chips that power modern personal computers, workstations, file servers, super computers and the internet. Since 1994, he has lived in the south-central Arizona city of Chandler, a suburb of Phoenix in the Sonoran Desert.
E.J. has two sons, Nicholas, 17, and 12-year-old Gregory. He is also a freelance nature photographer. E.J. formally studied photography at the University of New Mexico and the Rocky Mountain School of Photography, and participated in photography seminars and workshops led by several renowned photographers.
He received his first camera at age seven—a now defunct 126, square-format, Kodak Instamatic. At age twelve, he started to take pictures more seriously using a Yashica 35mm rangefinder with a 50mm f1.7 lens. At sixteen he switched to Minolta cameras, starting with the XD-11 SLR and progressing through the Minolta system—ultimately ending up with the Minolta Maxxum 9000, the first pro-featured auto-focus SLR, in the late 1980’s. In 1990, E.J. suffered a serious skiing injury with a diagnosis that would prevent him from walking again, so he sold all of his Minolta equipment. Determination, resolve and many months of physical therapy resulted in a full recovery after several surgeries, 3 1/2 years later. During his recovery years, he got drive and determination from aviation, earning Private Pilot, Instrument Pilot, Multi-engine Pilot and Commercial Pilot certificates. He also became heavily involved in advanced flight simulation as pilot training aids and started writing articles about them for aviation magazines.
After his recovery, he purchased an Olympus IS-1 Zoom Lens Reflex camera which he found to be way too limiting so he started over in 1994 using the Nikon system, eventually ending up with Nikon Professional bodies and Nikon’s professional grade AF-S lenses. The choice of Nikon was heavily influenced by John Shaw’s photography and E.J. concentrated primarily on Southwestern landscapes and captive species animal photography. In 1999, his photographic world expanded when he was introduced to the bird photography of Arthur Morris through his book “The Art of Bird Photography.” As E.J. got into bird photography, it became apparent that Canon’s Image Stabilization technology would result in a much higher percentage of sharp photos with the very long focal length lenses needed to get full-frame bird photographs. Since December 2000, he has been photographing with Canon’s professional EOS 1 series of camera bodies and Canon “L – series” professional lenses. In early 2002, E.J. switched to Canon digital SLR’s. Today his primary landscape tool is the 16.7 megapixel EOS 1Ds Mark II and his primary wildlife camera is the EOS 1D Mark IIn camera. When he needs to travel light, he uses the EOS 5D and EOS 30D.
Artistic images of ducks is a photographic specialty and love of E.J.’s, and he teaches others duck and bird photography through his DuckShop™ photographic workshop series. He has also expanded his love for landscape photography and is now heavily engaged in creating artistic landscape images of North America’s great scenic wonders. He has graduated from captive wildlife species to those that roam in the wild and rarely photographs captive animals anymore.
E.J.’s photographs have been published in many nature, agriculture and photography magazines and books including Outdoor Photographer, Popular Photography, Birding Magazine, Audubon Society publications, Barron’s Duck Handbook, Barron’s Dove Handbook, the UK’s Practical Photography and many other publications. The US National Park Service uses some of his images in their National Park Brochures as does the Fish and Wildlife Service. Several zoos from around the world (North America, Asia, Europe) use his photographs for their identification displays. His photos are also in widespread use in educational material for children in both Canada and the US. He was a Field Editor, Forum Moderator, and contributing author for the web-based Nature Photography magazine NaturePhotographers.net until 2003 and is now Senior Technical Editor and co-founder of the nature photography web site NatureScapes.net. He has had a private exhibition of 30 of his photographs in Israel and teaches an annual Introduction to Bird Photography course at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum in Superior, AZ which is sponsored by the Audubon Society in conjunction with The University of Arizona.
For more information on E.J. Peiker, please visit his website at www.ejphoto.com.
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