“I love photography,” says Franca Marazia. “It is my great escape.”

She focuses on the world she knows best.

“I photograph everyday objects, daily life activities, the environment that surrounds us, and the people and pets I meet along the way,” she tells me.

Marazia, 59, who lives in Hamilton, taught elementary school for 30 years. She says she is self-taught when it comes to photography, but she has had many years in which to sharpen her skills.

“I have always been photographing something, usually at family functions,” she says. “I seem to be the keeper of memories. I used photography in my classroom as well.”

Camera in hand, she usually sets out with a destination and a plan. But she welcomes the photograph that presents itself when she is not expecting it.

“Knowing the right scene is hard to explain,” she says. “It’s something I feel.”

Marazia is a regular contributor to Art in the Workplace at McMaster Innovation Park, located at 175 Longwood Rd. S. One of her offerings in the current show is “Sunset Boulevard,” taken at Pier 8 in the West Harbour.

She found a scene with a variety of shapes and textures, some of them unexpected.

Three figures sit at a table silhouetted in front of a landscape lying beyond a fence. The regular verticals of the fence contrast with the humans’ irregular shapes. A sparkling body of water leads to a horizontal strip of wooded land in the distance. This darkened land mass complements the dark human shapes in the foreground.

The sky, which fills the upper two-thirds of the composition, contributes a different combination of colours and textures, including an emphatic circle of sun.

“I had been photographing activity on the water and on the pathways,” she recalls. “Just happened to stay long enough to capture a breathtaking summer sunset. In trying to shoot its reflection on the water, one of my images included a family sitting at a picnic table. I didn’t realize what I had until I uploaded the images onto my computer.”

Marazia is never without her camera when she travels. In Viseu, Portugal, she was sitting at an outdoor café when she saw a man feeding pigeons, a familiar sight that inspired a sepia photograph.

A spacious foreground leads to six pigeons, each one attentively facing the man seated on a bench. He’s leaning toward them, looking at the food in his hand. He is as attentive as they are. Cars are lined up behind him, a background of modern urban clutter that contrasts with the timelessness and spaciousness of the event in the foreground.

In Amsterdam, Marazia found bicycles.

“It was bicycle heaven for me,” she says. “I captured hundreds of them. Such variety in design and functionality.”

In “Sunshine Yellow” she comes up close to bicycles wet with rain. In cropping the scene, Marazia draws our attention to the many circles and lines that crowd and overlap one another.

Red paving bricks and green moss add more geometric shapes and bright hues.

“I have a large collection of bicycle images. I’ve thought about why I feel the need to capture these images,” she explains. “On the one hand, I am reminded of earlier days, my teen years, when I practically lived on my bright blue ten-speed. It was my method of transportation for getting to my part-time job and for meeting up with friends. On the other hand, I am drawn in by the colour and design — the wheels of freedom.”

WATERLOO — Joy Huggins and her daughter were walking through a park when they discovered a baby squirrel with a broken leg.

Huggins packed up the tiny critter and took it to a wildlife rehabilitator.

That was nearly 15 years ago.

For the past 10 years Huggins has been operating a provincially-authorized wildlife rehab centre out of her home in Waterloo.

“It just changed my life,” the 50-year-old said. “I really felt like I was meant to do this; I love animals.”

Huggins receives animal intakes from across the province. Her name is listed on the Ministry of Natural Resources’ website so she is constantly called by people finding injured or abandoned baby animals.

“Spring and summer is crazy, crazy because of the babies,” said Huggins. “The babies need constant feeding.”

Most of the six squirrels she has in her care now were babies that were abandoned in the fall and would not have been able to survive the winter on their own.

“(With) baby squirrels, the mom gets hit or killed somehow and these babies … fall out of the nest looking for mom because they’re hungry,” she said.

“If their eyes are open they actually seek out people — they’ll come up to people, they’ll climb up their leg, I’ve even had people say, ‘he was scratching at the door.'”

Three of the tinier squirrels Huggins has are kept indoors in enclosures where they enjoy swinging from their hammocks or doing back flips off the sides of their cages.

The heartier and fluffier ones are in a large wooden enclosure in the backyard.

The Wildlife Haven is operated entirely on donations and with the help of volunteers.

And there’s never a dull day at the house. At any moment Huggins could be doing an intake, releasing an animal back to the wild, feeding the animals their specialty diets, tending to injuries, or just keeping all the indoor and outdoor enclosures tidy.

And she always has an animal story to tell. Some are happy and some are heartbreaking.

She has two pigeons that fell in love while in her care. Romeo and Juliette sit side-by-side in separate enclosures taking turns sitting on an egg.

She also has a mallard duck healing after it was found frozen to the ground near RIM Park a few weeks ago.

Then there’s Roo, the grouchy groundhog she has had for five years. The Ministry of Natural Resources has permitted Huggins to keep Roo as an education animal as he is unable to be released back to the wild.

Huggins takes him to a senior’s residence in Kitchener from time to time.

She also gets the occasional possum.

“These guys sleep with their eyes open; it’s creepy,” she said with a laugh. “I didn’t know that when I first got one.”

Huggins is also caring for a quail, crows, goldfinches, a barn swallow, a cedar wax wing, pigeons and a number of finches.

Finches come in with eye infections commonly caused by dirty bird feeders, she said adding that most people don’t realize they have to clean them out regularly.

While the work is rewarding, it’s also challenging.

Huggins has seen many animals die due to severe injuries. These stories are hard to forget.

But it can also be heartbreaking to release animals that have recovered under her care.

“It’s very bittersweet,” she said. “You’ve got your goal, you’re going to release them, but then I can’t watch over them anymore … I struggle with that (but) that’s where they belong.”