David Salomon

Writer, photographer, real estate developer

David Salomon is a lifelong photographer, part-time writer, and full-time real estate developer in Dallas, Texas. As a photographer, David prefers to take his camera outdoors and utilize natural light to capture the beautiful world and its lovely inhabitants. He is known for his patience and love for animals, and he believes that if the photographer will wait long enough, the animal will eventually model for him. David says, “I normally go out thinking like a painter, not a photographer. I more or less have in mind a specific composition that I will try to capture. This requires that the animal become comfortable with me. Sometimes I make noises to try to communicate with it, and sometimes I hide behind a barrier. I set the camera and watch until the animal begins modeling for me. I might not open the shutter for an hour or two, but then the composition I was expecting appears, and I will shoot as many frames as I can to get the best possible picture.”

After being struck by “penguin-mania” while visiting Chilean Patagonia, David spent the next two summers traveling the Southern Hemisphere, becoming one of very few people to actually see and photograph all seventeen penguin species in the wild. His photographs were then combined with the most up-to-date research to create the most comprehensive penguin book available today, Penguin-Pedia: Photographs and Facts from One Man’s Search for the Penguins of the World, published November 2011.

In 2014 Salomon published Igor Samsonov: Painter and Passionate Visionary, a book which showcases the work of contemporary Russian painter Igor Samsonov. Taking pictures of paintings is naturally a deviation from photographing animals, but David recognized many of his own artistic motives in Samsonov’s paintings. Being a nature photographer, he often has three things in mind when standing in front of a painting: color, composition, and movement. In Samsonov, he found a rare artist who is a master of all three of these elements and much more. With Igor Samsonov: Painter and Passionate Visionary, David shines a light on Samsonov’s works by displaying each of the artist’s paintings along with its respective story.

Random House will be publishing David’s newest book Penguins! on October 10, 2017 as part of their Step into Reading series for children. Penguins! follows a penguin couple through their efforts to raise a chick and uses David’s original photographs of Chinstrap penguins in the wild. It is a Step 2 Reader, which uses basic vocabulary and short sentences to tell simple stories, intended for children who recognize familiar words and can sound out new words with help.