Former McHenry teacher looks to the sky for photos' inspiration

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McHENRY – When Ray Mathis was a little boy, he used to spend hours looking through old calendars filled with photos of sunsets and sunrises in his grandma’s basement. That’s when he decided that he wanted to shoot the same types of photos when he grew up.

Then, a few years ago, he was in a Utah grocery store browsing through similar calendars, when he saw a picture of a canyon from an angle that he liked to photograph.

 “I was getting so upset, because I was thinking, ‘Somebody found my spot!’ ” he said.

After frantically flipping through the months, he realized that the photo actually was one of his own.

The company had paid him for a picture but never told him how they were going to use it.

“You never know what they’re going to publish,” he said.

Now Mathis, a retired McHenry High School health teacher, devotes his time to capturing nature in unusual ways, not only locally, but also around the country.

He has had his work published on magazine covers, on postcards and in calendars. He also is in talks with a major corporation about a billboard advertising campaign.

Mathis’ work can be found hanging around McHenry County in places such as the McHenry County Government Center.

He started with a 35 mm camera, and although his film has gotten larger since then – he now uses 4-inch-by-5-inch – he hasn’t changed too much and gone digital.

Mathis said the film made it easier to make poster-sized portraits that didn’t look grainy.

“I’m a small fish in a big pond,” he said. “When I get out there, there’s a lot of people shooting landscapes now that everybody has a digital point and shoot.”

His work, which hangs in poster-sized frames all over his home, is focused mainly on sunrises and sunsets.

He said that when he was 15, his grandfather died, and he promised himself that he would never miss another sunrise. That’s a promise that Mathis has kept for more than 40 years now.

Some of the pictures are clearly of angles that required Mathis to stand at the end of cliffs with large drops.

“It’s spooky. I plant my feet. I never move my feet,” he said. “But that’s what you’ve got to do if you want to get the shoot.”

Locally, he doesn’t run into many cliffs, but he does have another problem – mosquitoes and ticks. When he goes out to shoot in the morning, he tucks in his socks, wears a hood complete with a mosquito net, and carries bug spray in his inside jacket pocket.

“I layer so they can’t get to me,” he said. “It’s just like this buzzing swarming around your face.”

Eric Halloran, owner of edesign, 3909 W. Main St., McHenry, said he had known Mathis for a while. The two work together to turn the photos into large, poster-sized prints.  

“He tries to keep all technology, all human elements out of [the picture] so it could have been 10,000 years ago,” Halloran said.

Mathis said manmade structures had interfered with his work more and more as the years went by.

“Some of the pictures I take, I can’t take them anymore, because somebody put a building up there,” he said. “I once took one of a field, and the next day somebody mowed it.”

About a dozen of Mathis’ pictures hang at Strelcheck Chiropractic Clinic, 10 N. Virginia St., Crystal Lake.

Linda Kennedy, a receptionist there, said the clinic had no windows, so having landscape pictures on the walls lifted the atmosphere. All the photos are McHenry County scenes.

“Everybody asks about them. They can’t believe that they’re photographs,” she said. “It’s cool, because our patients can recognize the places, and it kind of brings the outside in.”

Mathis said he thought pictures of nature even could help people feel better if they were sick.

“When people see things like this, it really causes them to stop,” he said. “It distracts them.”

Mathis has no intention of missing a sunrise anytime soon.

“Look what I’ve crammed my life with,” Mathis said, pointing to his photos. “Look at all the sky I’ve seen that everybody else has missed. That’s my message to people, ‘Look what you missed.’ ”