Photography the focus of her multifaceted life

Not this year. Welsch is otherwise occupied this December, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. Her age (62) and health (her doctor recommended knee surgery earlier this year; she opted, successfully, for an alternative therapy) have little effect on her determination.

Obstacles don't, generally. Self-taught and self-made, Welsch was the first female staff photographer at both the Boston Herald Traveler and the Globe, where she began working in 1971. "When I started," she recalls, "I didn't even know how to use a flash."

She learned. She covered Caroline Kennedy's Harvard graduation -- from the forbidden but fruitful vantage point of a tree. She was part of the Pulitzer-winning Globe team that covered the school-busing turmoil of the early '70s.

Newspaper work "taught me to be confident," she says. "I was working for a company that was big and had clout. And almost every photo I took was used in the paper."

Nonetheless, after a seven-month soul-searching trip to the Andes, she left the Globe in 1981 so she could own her work and pick her subjects. It was a risky career choice that has resulted in a number of books: seven and counting.

The latest -- "Boston's North Shore," published this summer by Commonwealth Editions -- is a visual homage to the area where she's lived for nearly four decades. Along with images you'd expect (sailboats, polo ponies) is one of "Le Grand David and His Own Spectacular Magic Company" in their Beverly home theater, and another of the sleek, shiny, but lonely looking Agawam Diner, which seems straight out of an Edward Hopper painting.

Welsch started her career as a druggist. In her native Germany, that meant duties including processing rolls of film. She'd wanted to become a pharmacist, but after her father died, in 1947, there wasn't enough money for pharmacy school. Becoming a druggist required fewer years of training. So she worked in drugstores around Germany, developing film and decorating windows -- training her eye, though she didn't then know it. A romance with an American soldier piqued her interest in coming to these shores; a chance meeting with a woman from New Jersey meant a sponsor for her move.

After a couple of weeks in the New York/New Jersey area, she headed north, living at the Cambridge YWCA, then in Beacon Hill apartments shared with other expatriate young women. She worked at a camera shop for $72 a week.

It was culture shock.

"In Germany," she recalls, "we'd put a felt cloth down on the counter and then bring out the camera to show to the customer. We had to wear white coats, like doctors. It was formal, and the customer was king. Here, the customer wasn't king. Eventually, customers stood in line for me here, because of my attitude and because I knew about techniques."

Sheer drive led her to seek out Minor White, the famous photographer then at MIT. "I showed him my work," she recalls. "He did not encourage me."

Undaunted, she journeyed to the American West and tracked down an even bigger name, Ansel Adams. She got permission to photograph him while he was photographing scenery. "Then I showed him the same photos I'd shown Minor White," she recalls, "and he said, `You have good ideas.' He didn't crush me, and that gave me hope. Later on, when I was teaching, I remembered his example and never crushed a student."

It wasn't the seaside town's charms that lured her to Marblehead; it was the desire for a car. She couldn't afford the automobile insurance in Boston. So, in 1966, she bought an MG and headed north. She's come to love the place, and in 2000 produced a book about it: "Marblehead," a four-season chronicle centered on the sea but looking inland as well, at such telling details as a row of mailboxes, laundry lines, and tombstones.

Thomas McNulty, for 18 years a Marblehead selectman and now town clerk, says of Welsch, "I've admired her work since she moved here. Uli has a great feel for composition, along with color, shapes, and lighting. Those of us who try for that as amateurs really appreciate how she actually achieves it. She has a lot of support in Marblehead. People here like having that kind of talent and verve in the community."

While journalism taught Welsch to be aggressive, she is by nature considerate in her personally driven work. "I have to respect people's feelings," she says, "and not just stick a camera in their faces." In Chile, a man in a wheelchair chopping wood captivated her. She got his permission to photograph him "because it was important to make a picture of a handicapped person doing something positive."

In many quarters she's still best known for her journalism work. "I remember that when I looked at the paper and saw a picture that really caught my eye, it was often by her," says Martha Hassell, the academic director of the New England School of Photography.

Since leaving the Globe, she's compiled her own photographic stock library. Her images turn up in textbooks, magazines, and calendars. She's proud that her work has gone beyond recording events. "I come from photojournalism," she says. "Newspapers formed me. I used to shoot pictures instantly. Now I take time to make something more."

She's not above engineering a picture. Spying a little boy with a big fishing net, standing in a pond and waiting to catch a bullfrog, she decided he'd make a great image -- if only he'd move to the left, near some tall reeds. So she told him a bullfrog was behind the grasses. (It wasn't.) He moved. The resulting image, "Tranquility," "has the feeling of Japanese haiku," Welsch says. In the instructional manual she wrote in 1999, "Stock Photography: Professional Techniques and Images," she explains how she set up the shot -- and the boy -- and also how she marketed the image, which has been used in poetry publications, as a greeting card, and as art. "I don't mind being in all those worlds," she says.

"Tranquility" is one of her three all-time bestsellers. "Volkswagen," a photo of a dog in the driver's seat of a Beetle with a Christmas tree tied on top, is another: The funny-dog thing is reminiscent of William Wegman. The third is "Nor'Easter," a ship in a stormy sea reminiscent of the paintings of J.M.W. Turner. To get the image, Welsch herself went to sea, in a small lobster boat. Hanging over the side, she got the view she wanted -- the distant ship with its hull half-hidden by a giant wave.

The city is also her subject. In last year's "Boston Rediscovered," a book so picturesque it could have been produced by a tourism board, she indulges in her love of reflections in an image of the old John Hancock building shimmering on the mirrored surface of the new one. No garbage, no homeless people, nothing of life's bitter side turns up in Welsch's Boston, which is an urban paradise. You'd be unlikely to guess that the book is by a woman who once documented the chaotic busing of the city's schoolchildren.

Welsch's current work has nothing of the edgy, brash, controversial qualities of the kind of contemporary photography that turns up in museum exhibitions designed to provoke.

She says she doesn't pay much attention to the world of contemporary photography, but "I've gotten interested in drawing. And I'd like to learn to paint."

Her house testifies to her multiple interests. "I made this myself," she says, gazing at a huge slice of a willow tree she's turned into a rugged coffee table. "I did some drumming at one time," she adds, picking up an African drum and pounding out complex rhythms, explaining that she studied with a drummer from Mali who was teaching at the Marblehead Y. It's photography, though, that's the center of her life. She leafs through one of her books until she finds a photo she made of a woman's head, dark and velvety. The only light she used for the shot came from the match igniting the cigarette the subject was holding. The burst of white looks a bit like a dove.

"It's my Rembrandt," she says. Then she changes her mind. "No," she adds, "it's me."