BARRY WILLIAMS /Special

"Italian Sunflowers" was taken in Gubbio, Italy.

By day, Phyllis Hlavac is the perinatal clinical nurse specialist at Northside Hospital's busy family-care center. Working alongside medical, laboratory and pharmacy professionals, she applies her 35 years of OB/GYN nursing experience to achieve the best outcomes for her patients.

On weekends and vacations, Hlavac leaves the clinical world behind and heads for the outdoors. She uses her two cameras and five lenses to take photographs in settings such as Ossabaw Island, Nova Scotia, New Zealand and the Canadian Rockies.

During October's Atlanta Celebrates Photography annual event, Hlavac's work was exhibited in about half a dozen venues around Atlanta.

"There were 320 images submitted for the Roswell Photographic Society Show, and only 70 [were] selected, so I was thrilled just to get something in," said Hlavac, RNC, MN.

She won an honorable mention for a roofline shot of a Victorian house on Martha's Vineyard.

Last year, she won a second-place award in the event for an image of orange and yellow tulips reflected in a cobalt blue glass.

"I was trying to take a straightforward shot of the flowers against the glass, when I moved a couple of steps, saw the reflection and thought, 'What am I doing?' The reflection is so crisp it makes people wonder how the flowers got in that blue glass," she said.

An assistant manager at the hospital talked her into taking an adult education photography class in 1990, and Hlavac was hooked.

"I really liked it, particularly working in color," she said.

She prefers working with the slides and transparencies of Fuji Velvia film because of its vivid and intense color saturation. She scans the images and uses a computer as her "digital darkroom." She prints her images on archival paper.

Most people would describe Hlavac as a nature photographer, but she leaves the grand landscapes to professionals like the late Ansel Adams, who worked with a large-format camera.

"Panoramic scenes aren't really suited to 35mm format," she said.

Hlavac is attracted to the details, bold colors, symmetry and patterns she sees in nature.

"In Santa Fe and Taos (in New Mexico), I shot doorways and windows, pieces of adobe structures — enough to tell a story, but not a whole city street," she said.

What she doesn't photograph is people. She has no interest in photojournalism or catching the fleeting emotions on a person's face.

"I get enough people drama working in a hospital," she said.

Like most art forms, photography is harder than it looks. Hlavac throws away about 90 percent of what she shoots.

"Our brains pick and choose what we want to see, but the camera sees it all," she said. "And while we live in a three-dimensional world, photos are two-dimensional. It's a different way of seeing.

"When I'm on a trip, it usually takes the whole first day of shooting to get back the concentration and the mindset. If I shoot four rolls of 36 frames in a day and get two pictures I even care about, I'm thrilled."

By taking professional courses, Hlavac has learned to critique her work for its impact, composition and technique.

"People taking pictures get hung up on what they felt about the subject or the place and not what the camera actually saw. A photographer has to move beyond the memory to see what a photograph would mean to someone who wasn't there," she said.

One of her favorite photographs is a shot of a sailboat that she took just before dawn on Martha's Vineyard.

"It was a calm morning with a little bit of fog. There's more color than you realize before the sun comes up, and the camera caught all the magenta and pink in the sky," Hlavac said.

Although she has sold a few photographs and uses her teaching skills to assist with photographic workshops she attends, the nurse has no desire to switch careers. She enjoys photography as an avocation and a creative outlet.

"Because the subject matter is so different (from nursing), photography is a form of therapy for me. It adds different friends, activities and a different focus to my life," she said.

Hlavac remembers fondly a two-week trip to Italy with a photographer friend.

"Neither of us spoke the language or knew where we were going. It was just these two crazy ladies in a car with cameras and tripods," she said.

"I think I'm a better nurse because I take time off and come back to it."