Other than the ripple of hungry fish brushing it’s undersurface on a recent morning, Ice Pond in Georgetown was an immaculate mirror; perfect for the task nature photographer Rob Smith had at hand.

“I look for a calm day like this when I come out to this spot,” said Smith, “and they’re not too frequent.”

Smith’s preference is to be on location, ready to shoot before sunrise. Leaving his Cundy’s Harbor home well before “magic hour,” as photographers call the first and last hours of sunlight in a day, Smith set up his gear, waiting and watching to see if magic hour or the thin layer of cloud cover would be first to disappear.

“I want to be here when the sun just hits those dead trees across the way there and the water is still dark,” said Smith, pointing across a marshland of dead trunks and water lilies. “That enhances the color and the reflections — the darker water and brighter trees.

“Right now it’s pretty flat,” he said. “But it’s not a bad place to spend the morning, is it?”

After graduating high school, Smith immediately enrolled in the Art Institute of Boston but soon withdrew from the program.

“It was too hard,” Smith said, so he transferred to the University of New Haven where he studied biology.

“Then I got a job in the construction business and ended up running a large commercial outfit in New Hampshire for 35 years,” said Smith.

Starting as a carpenter for North Branch Construction in Concord, Smith became president and CEO of the company before his retirement in 2008 and subsequent move to Harpswell. “I always had hobbies — woodworking, boating, fishing — but somehow photography has just consumed me,” said Smith. “I try to shoot every day. It’s kind of like a drug; if I don’t shoot, I feel a little depressed.”

Smith shoots flowers, landscapes and seascapes, abstracts, events and various forms of wildlife, but one of his favorite subjects to photograph are birds.

“A lot of the time when I’m shooting birds I’ll go sit in a spot for two hours and get five or 10 seconds of action,” said Smith. “This camera takes 12 frames a second — I get an osprey diving and just hope you don’t blow the exposure.”

Though other subjects can be highly dependent on lighting and weather conditions, birds have the added complexity of rapid movement and their natural skittishness.

“If you sit still in a spot for 15 minutes, they’ll start to get used to you and start working their way closer and closer,” said Smith. “And then it’s a challenge to capture them the way that you want — sometimes I want to show movement and sometimes I want clarity of every feather and every little vein.

“I was taking pictures once of a great egret mother and father with three babies in the nest,” he said. “I probably had 200 shots of this one family, and out of that I had two shots which I think were good. They’re all moving, and they’re all moving differently.”

In framing a shot, Smith looks for ways to separate the subject of the photograph out from its surrounding environment.

“If I want to shoot a water lily for example, I want to get as close as I possibly can to it to eliminate everything else,” said Smith. “Get your subject to fill the frame as much as possible and eliminate the mess around it, the chaos.

“Nature is chaotic, but as you start getting close to things the detail is just amazing,” he said. “Especially with flowers.”

Though Smith’s work is currently on display at Summer Island Studio in Brunswick and Boothbay Region Arts in Boothbay Harbor, and he will have a showing in November at the Gilsland Farm Audubon Center in Falmouth — he said he’s content with photography being a hobby.

“I sell some pieces at shows, but the last thing I want to do is make a business out of this,” said Smith. “That’s why I stopped going to art school — it became business after that, and it takes all the fun out of it if you have to answer to somebody.”

Instead, Smith prefers answering only to nature itself, and the challenges posed by the scope of his lens.

“I have images in my mind that I want to capture, and it may be two or three years before I can get it,” said Smith. “A lot of it is having the perfect light and being there to capture it — sometimes it’s a bust and sometimes it’s great.

“You create your own luck by being there,” he said. “If you’re not out there, you’re not going to get it — I just wish I could be in five places at once.” For more information about Rob Smith Fine Art Photography, visit www.rgsmithphoto.com.