{"id":12004,"date":"2015-09-23T09:53:36","date_gmt":"2015-09-23T13:53:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=12004"},"modified":"2015-11-18T13:23:57","modified_gmt":"2015-11-18T18:23:57","slug":"local-dentist-shares-passion-for-african-wildlife-in-new-photo-exhibition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/local-dentist-shares-passion-for-african-wildlife-in-new-photo-exhibition\/","title":{"rendered":"Local dentist shares passion for African wildlife in new photo exhibition"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

Shame. <\/p>\n

It is just one word, but it is a singular utterance that summed up a range of emotions for Aurora\u2019s Ron Goodlin as he joined the ranks of millions around the world horrified by the killing of Cecil, The Lion in Zimbabwe by American dentist Walter Palmer.<\/p>\n

It was a shame Goodlin felt not just as a lover of wildlife, with a particular passion for Africa but, as many people around Aurora might have guessed, as a dentist as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe tracked it for 48 hours as it died a slow, agonizing death,\u201d recalls Dr. Goodlin, throwing his hands up in the air. \u201cAre you kidding me? How can you do that? I was ashamed and embarrassed, not just as a dentist, but for the whole human race. What we do to these poor animals and our environment is just shameful.\u201d<\/p>\n

But there is a palpable sense of pride shared by Dr. Goodlin as he shows off his vivid photographs of lions, rhinos, hippos, wildebeest and zebra in their natural habitat, now available for all to see at the Aurora Cultural Centre. <\/p>\n

When Dr. Goodlin was a boy of 15, his father was diagnosed with cancer. At the time, his mother was looking for ways to get her young son\u2019s mind off this weighty matter and, while on a shopping trip one day, hit upon the idea of getting him a camera.<\/p>\n

\u201cI took it home and thought it was pretty cool and got me pretty interested in it,\u201d he recalls.<\/p>\n

Influenced by famed World War Two photographer Stu Friedman, who died this month, he became enthralled by the photographic process, particularly as images emerged from soaking paper in the dim light of the darkroom. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re hooked,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n

From there, he parlayed his passion into working on his school\u2019s yearbook before heading off for a course at the New York Institute of Photography before embarking on his dental studies. But, there too he was able to exercise his passion, although happening upon a way to do so came out in an
\nexpected way.<\/p>\n

In his second year, he and his fellow students were taking a class trip to another dental school in Buffalo and, as a prank, decided to take one of their school\u2019s dental chairs as a gift to their host faculty. As such equipment was then worth over $30,000, that didn\u2019t go over so well with the dental brass in Toronto and the future Dr. Goodlin was already skating on thin ice.<\/p>\n

Back at home, the school\u2019s dean suggested he funnel these high spirits into creative avenues, setting him on the path of taking photos for dental publications.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy the end of the summer, I wrote a paper on how to do dental photography,\u201d he says with a laugh. \u201cI had never written one before, but after second year I was now the world expert in dental photography! After I graduated, I kept this photography business going.\u201d<\/p>\n

That eventually branched out into fashion and wedding photography before he \u201cgot tired of working for everyone else\u201d and charted his own path, setting his viewfinder on landscapes and wildlife \u2013 all on his own terms.<\/p>\n

In between balancing his work in his successful Aurora dental practice, Dr. Goodlin made his first trip to Africa in 2011. Accompanied by his wife, he says she was skeptical of their expedition at first, but bought her a video camera in the hopes she would be inspired by the nature around her.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was no interest; it was like me buying a blender for our anniversary!\u201d he says. \u201cBut, the night before, she asked how to use the camera. We landed in Kilimanjaro and went to Arusha the next day. There were a bunch of monkeys jumping around and she thought that was pretty cool. We got back into the truck and turned a corner, and it was like a ride at Disneyland. You turn a corner and there they all are. We saw hundreds of zebras and wildebeests in front of us and my wife is going, \u2018Wow! Wow! Where\u2019s the camera?!\u2019 She filmed the entire time.\u201d<\/p>\n

As he looks over his photographs, Dr. Goodlin becomes wistful of the majestic beauty Africa offers, despite the best efforts of poachers who have decimated populations of elephant and rhinos for their tusks and horns, either for use in the ivory trade or, in the case of rhinos, for aphrodisiacs popular in Asian medicine.<\/p>\n

It is not just the wildlife that have captured Dr. Goodlin\u2019s heart, this love also extends to the Maasai people of Kenya and Tanzania, whom he has visited with fellow doctors to help build schools and provide simple medical treatments to the populations, whether looking out for their basic oral health, or applying Polysporin.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want people to have an understanding of how wonderful these animals are and how horribly humans are treating these animals,\u201d he says. \u201cI want my photographs to bring some awareness and maybe give more insight to stop the madness of poaching and killing, and encourage a love of these animals in the wild.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ron Goodlin: A Lens on Africa is on now at the Aurora Cultural Centre running through November 21.<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shame. It is just one word, but it is a singular utterance that summed up a range of emotions for Aurora\u2019s Ron Goodlin as he joined the ranks of millions around the world horrified by the killing of Cecil, The Lion in Zimbabwe by American dentist Walter Palmer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":11977,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archive"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/2015-09-24-08.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-37C","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-11 02:26:51","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12004\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}