San Marcos — Judith Nicholls goes to great lengths to notice the things in life most of us might miss.

Whether it’s roadside flowers or a waiter resting on a stool inside a bustling restaurant, her job as a photographer is to make you look: Make you really look.

“I try to bring out what I saw in my mind’s eye when I took the picture. It's about bringing out what struck me at the time as interesting. That means you have to isolate it in a way that brings out the character of it that you want others to experience,” Nicholls said.

The Wimberley-based photographer currently has several of her photos on display at the San Marcos Area Chamber of Commerce, as part of the ongoing  San Marcos Art League exhibition.

A computer physicist by trade— and on a team of experts creating some of the United States’ first websites  — Nicholls stumbled into photography as a hobby after she and her husband started a travel website in 1996.

She took so many pictures going from the Caribbean to Europe to Russia that her husband grumbled at the cost involved with them. But her photos quickly became the main draw to their site.

And what started as a simple hobby slowly grew to much more.

“I had a lot of hobbies. I wasn’t really worried bout being terribly bored when I retired,” Nicholls said. “I didn’t know that photography would become so obsessive for me.”

Nicholls was born and raised on the outskirts Kansas City, MO. She and her family embraced nature and traveling from the beginning, camping in Colorado almost every year.

Though she played piano as a kid, Nicholls’ main interest was science. She finished high school in three years and attended Missouri State College to study both math and science.

“I always saw myself doings something with science. I think I thought of math first, but there were no computers when I was in school. When I thought of math as a career, the only jobs that I thought of were teaching and I didn’t think I wanted to teach... I had a good physics teacher in college and that was when we were putting up rockets (into space) for the first time. A rocket scientist is what I had in mind  at the time.”

After two years at Missouri State,  Nicholls went on to Iowa State University and got married. Her husband got a position at MIT in Boston, so Nicholls transferred to Boston University, where she earned her Bachelor of Arts.

“Then I attended grad school at Brandeis in Waltham, Mass. and did my post doctorate at Harvard,” Nicholls said.

Upon earning a PhD in High Energy Physics, Nicholls eventually remarried her current husband Gil. When he was transferred to the Chicago area, Nicholls went to work for Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. in computer support for physics. By 1992, she was helping Fermi build some of the first websites in the country.

“The World Wide Web (not the Internet itself, but what we now call the Web) was invented at a similar laboratory in Switzerland to help physicists communicate with each other,” Nicholls said. “The U.S. physics laboratories had the first websites in the United States. So I’ve been involved with building Web pages from the beginning.”

In 1996, Gil and Judith started their own travel agency, and Judith kept up the website. She documented their excursions through her camera, and the photos on top of their websites began to draw more and more people. Nicholls began to recognize her skill as a photographer, all while still working at Fermi Lab.

“I did the website weekends and nights, and we both had a fair amount of vacation through our jobs,” Nicholls said. “We did a lot of the Caribbean because that’s where our customers went. We also went to Thailand and China, and Russia, a huge number of European river cruises, Australia and Central America.”

Her method? Simply documenting everything she saw. That strategy has changed over the years, Nicholls says, as she has fine-tuned her craft.

“A lot of my work on the travel site was very documentary, but now what I like to do is I’ll see something that strikes me and then I want to either make it look like I saw it, or look like I would like to have looked,” Nicholls said. “I frequently process my images on a computer to make them better focus on my intended subject or goal of the photography.”

The two moved to Wimberley in 2006 after retiring and Judith suddenly had no avenue to share her pictures. So she joined the Wimberley Valley Art League — and later the San Marcos Art League and the Hill Country Photography Club — and moved from documentary photography to art photography.

“We moved to Wimberley to be near Gil’s sister. She told me one day ‘you’re a good photographer, why don’t you join the art league?’” Nicholls said. “And people have been very welcoming in this area. The Hill Country really is a great place to grow as an artist.”

She admits she’s still learning. But her philosophy remains challenging the viewer keep looking, experiencing the scenes or moments or points of view that normally get passed by.

“Why do people like to look at my pictures? They see things they didn’t notice, I hope,” Nicholls said.