GENA FLANIGEN - Photographer with an Eagle Eye

Photography has been a life-long hobby for Roman Gena Culbertson Flanigen. Her passion for photography was ignited when her parents bought her an old-fashioned point-and-shoot camera when she was about 12 years old. “I just started getting little better cameras as time went on and when I became assistant principal at Clear Creek (Elementary School in Bartow County) I needed some stress relief and so that’s when I bought my first Digital Single Lens Reflex camera,” Flanigen said.

Fast-forward almost a decade to the time the eagle nest was discovered behind the Cage Center on the Berry College campus. That was right about the time Flanigen made the decision to retire, and the eagles quickly became the focus of, well, her focus.

Over the past 13 years, Gena has probably spent as much time ‘with’ the pair of eagles who nest behind the Cage Center as anyone. During that time, her skills and knowledge of photography grew exponentially, and a few years ago, she was asked to provide photos for an exhibit at the Martha Berry Museum. The 2018 exhibit was titled “Sanctuary at Berry.”

Many of the images in the show were critters aside from the bald eagles. Her subject matter can range from hummingbirds to hawks or warblers to whooping cranes. If it flies, it’s liable to make its way into one of Flanigen’s viewfinders; she has plenty of them. Gena currently has five cameras and about seven lenses. She was quick to add that one of her lenses is more expensive than the first car she and her husband Rick purchased (a Volkswagen Rabbit) after they were married.

Gena loves her husband’s support. Rick will occasionally accompany her on a photo safari that could range from the Hiawassee National Wildlife Refuge in Tennessee to the Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge on the Georgia coast. She’s just as apt to journey from Guntersville to Gulf Shores in Alabama. If it’s on a flight path and the migration is on, Gena is liable to be there with multiple cameras and multiple lenses.

Her parents and grandparents both instilled a love of nature in Gena, and she has become one of the most proficient at photographing just about any kind of wildlife. Protecting the wildlife that she photographs is also very important to Gena. A few years ago, she got some beautiful pictures of rare and endangered Whooping cranes migrating with Sandhill cranes, but she won’t say where she took the pictures to protect the birds.

She has transitioned from the traditional DSLR cameras to the newer mirrorless ones. “The animal eye and bird eye detection is amazing (in the mirrorless cameras). Do you know how there is that digital noise level? There is less of that in the mirrorless cameras,” Flanigen. And the mirrorless cameras are much lighter, which is handy when she’s often toting two of them around on an outing. She’s sold most of her older gear to her many photographer friends. “I need to get rid of a few more,” Gena said.

Flanigen is a self-taught, trial-and-error photographer whose skills developed so quickly that she has published a pair of books featuring her photographs of the Berry Eagles. One is titled Majestic, published in 2015, and the other is titled Strength and Beauty, published in 2016. The newer cameras and lenses make good photography easy, and the intricate knowledge of camera settings that Flanigen has mastered helps make a lot of her work National Geographic caliber.

Recently, the retired educator has developed a passion for more common, smaller “yard birds,” particularly warblers and others that are more migratory and not always seen in the Rome area. “They’re not as common,” Flanigen said. Her ability to capture a perfect still shot of hummingbirds whose wings beat at a rate of 70 per second without distortion is a true testament to her working knowledge of the camera and lens.