After trading his fire chief’s uniform for Hawaiian shirts in May 2014, Pat Hart hasn’t slowed down much.

“Retirement’s great, but I’m still pretty busy,” he said.

The former Hermiston Fire & Emergency Services chief was at the Hermiston Public Library on Thursday, answering questions about his photography on display there through the end of the month.

Hart said he has done a senior portrait or two in the past, but his great passion is landscape photography. His computer currently has 46,000 pictures on it, he said, and while quite a few are personal snapshots of his four grandchildren, thousands more feature wheat fields, trees, waterfalls and lighthouses.

“I’ve got pictures from all over the country, from the East Coast to the West Coast,” Hart said.

He said the beauty of digital photography is that he can take 20 shots of an interesting tree to get just the right angle, but the downside is he’s not always very good about deleting the excess shots.

Banner Bank commissioned Hart to take the photographs featured in their Hermiston lobby, and Hart’s shot of Hermiston’s welcome sign hangs in Rep. Greg Smith’s office. He said others have asked for a photo of a certain size to hang in their living room, or commissioned a picture of a specific landmark that has special meaning to them, and he’s happy to do them all.

Hart participates in Hermiston’s photography club, which meets at the library at 5:30 p.m. the second Tuesday of every month to head out and shoot photos on location, sharing tips and constructive critiques as they go.

“I love talking about photography,” he said. “Any time someone wants to chat about photography, I’d love to grab a coffee with them.”

Examples of his prints for sale can be found at www.hartphoto.shutterfly.com or he can be reached at 541-571-3062 or hartphoto@machmedia.net.

When Hart isn’t busy taking photos, traveling or spending time with his grandchildren in Olympia and Virginia, he has been working on writing Morrow County’s emergency management plan, after doing Umatilla County’s last year.

He said he has also been helping Umatilla Fire District 1. He does miscellaneous projects, including some IT work with the phones and computers, and helped campaign for the ballot measure combining Hermiston and Stanfield’s fire districts this year. When he retired he talked with current fire chief Scott Stanton about possibly shooting some photos of fires that the district was fighting, but so far he is enjoying not being on call and so has left that to the department’s current employees.

“When I handed my badge over to Scott I turned my pager off and I haven’t turned it on since,” he said.

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Contact Jade McDowell at jmcdowell@eastoregonian.com or 541-564-4536.