Bill Hilton, Jr., is an educator-naturalist who brings the wonder of natural history to eager new audiences. His work is a logical step from an earlier career as a high school and college biology instructor who helped launch the South Carolina Governor's School for Science and Mathematics.

Hilton now works as a science education consultant across the U.S. and also serves as executive director for Hilton Pond Center for Piedmont Natural History in York, South Carolina. Established in 1982, the Center's mission is "to conserve animals, plants, habitats, and other natural components of the Piedmont Region of the eastern United States through observation, scientific study, and education for students of all ages."

"I learned about iView MediaPro [now Microsoft Expression Media] from MacWorld magazine, downloaded a trial version, and quickly learned I could look at a thumbnail and then load the actual image almost instantaneously. Now I can't get along without iView [now Expression Media]."

"Our main Web site at www.hiltonpond.org reports on diverse aspects of natural history, from birds to bees and flowers to trees," Hilton says. "To my knowledge no one else in the world is publishing a weekly photo essay about natural history—especially not one with the quality of photos and text that appear under 'This Week at Hilton Pond.' These regular postings are great teaching tools for students, educators, and laypeople of all ages. With a different topic each week, the installments are 'virtual field trips' that encourage people to go out and look at the natural world in their own backyards."

The Center also offers "Operation RubyThroat: The Hummingbird Project," an international initiative that uses ruby-throated hummingbirds (Archilochus colubris) as a hook to excite students and citizen scientists about conservation and the environment. This program—which has its own comprehensive Web site—has participants in the United States and Canada (where ruby-throated hummingbirds breed) as well as in Mexico and all seven Central American countries (where they spend winter months). The innovative project is supported in part by the National Science Foundation, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and ConocoPhillips.

Core to Hilton's teaching is the Socratic Method: asking questions rather than just lecturing. He also emphasizes that science doesn't know all the answers. "One thing I stress in teacher workshops is it's okay to say 'I don't know.' In fact, for a scientist, sometimes the finding of nothing is as important as the finding of something."

"iView MediaPro's [now Expression Media] power is in its cataloging flexibility."

Open-mindedness and proclivity for asking the right questions fits with Hilton's passion for exploring and sharing knowledge. "In my view there's no sense in doing anything—science or photography or education—if you don't share it," Hilton says. "While I do miss the daily rewards of classroom teaching, I'm finding there have never been more ways to engage the learning process. These days I can communicate, teach, and learn via the Center's two Web sites as well as through more traditional public programs, workshops, printed articles, and field trips.

"For example, we don't know specifically where ruby-throated hummingbirds go in winter—only that they migrate to somewhere in Mexico and Central America. So in December 2004 and January 2005 I'll be leading two field expeditions to Costa Rica to observe, catch, and band ruby-throats in hope of answering questions like 'where do ruby-throats that breed in the Boston area go in winter?' It will take only one banded hummingbird from the tropics showing up in Massachusetts the next spring to provide an initial answer to that question."

Hilton says his "favorite phrase in ecology is 'everything's connected to everything else'; in fact, what happens here in North America may well impact on what occurs in Central America. Knowing where those Massachusetts hummingbirds DO overwinter may provide rationale for protecting them and their habitats on both ends of the migratory route."

Hilton also sees similarities among organisms in different habitats. "Appearances may change, but functional roles stay the same, even from continent to continent. For example, in Australia various species of honeyeaters act very much like North American hummingbirds that eat nectar and pollinate."

"As you can imagine," Hilton says, "nature's not very silent, and iView MediaPro [now Expression Media] also helps me organize sound files."

Photography helps Hilton document his work. He took to the art early in life. As a boy, he was fascinated by wild creatures like frogs and salamanders he could 'shoot' with an old box camera in woods near his home in suburban Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Later he served as sports editor for his high school newspaper and editor in chief of his college newspaper, and since graduation, has published nature photos and articles in national magazines. Over the years, his personal photographic images have run the gamut from snakes to wildflowers to barely macroscopic organisms. And, as digital cameras improved, he discarded film entirely.

"I take digital photos at highest resolution, so my image files are rather large—typically 2.2 to 5 MB," Hilton says. His Canon D60 camera came with proprietary image downloading software but as an avid Apple fan, Hilton happily used iPhoto at first. He soon realized that he was going to need a program versatile and speedy enough to keep up with his fast-expanding collection of nature images.

"Despite my fondness for iPhoto, I needed an image cataloger that could download images quickly, enable me to sort them, and allow easy access," Hilton says. "I learned about iView MediaPro [now Expression Media] from MacWorld magazine, downloaded a trial version, and quickly learned I could look at a thumbnail and then load the actual image almost instantaneously. Now I can't get along without iView [now Expression Media]."

Workflow: Organizing images, sounds, and scholarly papers

External storage is a critical part of Hilton's triple-level fail-safe back-up system. After saving a copy of his just-filled compact flash card to an external hard drive and DVD, Hilton then downloads all the images from the card into Microsoft Expression Media (formerly iView MediaPro). From there, depending on what kind of image he's working with, he will either quick-edit in Expression Media (formerly iView MediaPro) or drag the image into Adobe Photoshop and tweak it there. "It's nice to have the choice," Hilton says. "For most 72 dpi Web photos, the iView MediaPro [now Expression Media] editing tools work fine. But if I'm printing a higher resolution image or want greater control, I'll edit in Adobe Photoshop."

"I especially like the drag-and-drop capabilities of iView [now Expression Media]. I create a new catalog for every download, so each compact flash card gets a new catalog temporarily. Then I immediately delete images I don't want—such as photos out of focus because the camera moved or a bird flew away. Next, I create new catalogs as appropriate—for example, one may be all blue jays and the other southern flying squirrels. If I already have a blue jay catalog, I open it and move all my new jay images into it. I also maintain a master catalog. I'm up to 23,000 images (all jpegs at reduced/optimized sizes) that comprise everything I've ever taken with digital cameras."

"For me, one of the very best things about iView MediaPro [now Expression Media] is that you can have multiple catalogs open
at one time. This lets me drag from master catalogs into other catalogs to create sub-catalogs—say one each for those birds, bees, flowers, and trees mentioned earlier—something I simply can't do in iPhoto."

"iView MediaPro's [now Expression Media] power is in its cataloging flexibility," Hilton says. "Everyone's approach is going to be slightly different, and this program is flexible enough to accommodate my style—the way I think and work. I choose to give each species of bird its own catalog because I'm always taking new photos, and new ones might be better than old images I've stored. iView MediaPro [now Expression Media] makes it easy to compare and delete the old photos. I've found that digital versions of some of my scanned-in 35mm slides can be discarded because they don't measure up to my current standards.

"iView MediaPro [now Expression Media] is also useful because I often write notes about certain images, in which case I use the metadata function. And," Hilton says, "when I travel to Costa Rica this winter, I'll utilize key words because I'll be photographing many different categories of things—landscapes, plants, animals, people, etc.—and I'll want to have notes for images taken at specific locations. Later, when I put together my first Microsoft PowerPoint presentation about the Costa Rica trip, I'll simply go to my iView MediaPro [now Expression Media] catalogs, search the metadata and key words, and pull out specific images by simply dragging the images directly onto individual PowerPoint slides.

"...it's not just about saving time, but helping me be more organized. iView MediaPro [now Expression Media] makes my life easier for all the diverse things I have to do as nature center director, on-line photojournalist, and educator-naturalist through Operation RubyThroat and Hilton Pond Center."

"As you can imagine," Hilton says, "nature's not very silent, and iView MediaPro [now Expression Media] also helps me organize sound files." Hilton has collected bird songs, frog calls, and night sounds into a master catalog of playable MP3s and AIFFs. "I might drag the blue jay courtship song into the blue jay image catalog to keep the files together as a reminder of how that bird sounds. I find this 'mixing of media' stimulates the creative process. I also have lots of PDF files and discovered if you drag them into iView MediaPro [now Expression Media] it creates a thumbnail of the file's cover page. You end up with a nice way to catalog scientific publications. For example, I have papers on hummingbirds that in iView MediaPro [now Expression Media] I can sort by author or title; iView MediaPro [now Expression Media] also takes me to where the PDF is stored on my hard drive (Action/Show Media File) so I can go to it if I want to read the whole paper. As a small non-profit, Hilton Pond Center doesn't have access to a huge research library, but many authors send us reprints. We scan those papers and—along with free PDF downloads from the Web—catalog them in iView MediaPro [now Expression Media] to make them instantly available as we prepare our own publications."