David Ondaatje was born and grew up in Canada. After graduating from Harvard College in Massachusetts and Cambridge University in England, he moved to California in 1987 where he has simultaneously pursued careers in business and the arts. For the past twenty-five years, he has been Chairman of the RL Winston Rod Company and has also been active as a filmmaker, writer, and photographer. His films have premiered at film festivals around the world including the Venice Biennale and his fly-fishing photography has been featured in print for many years. He was an early remote aerial photographer, enamored with the idea of capturing the beauty of familiar places differently than had been done previously using fixed-wing aircraft from higher elevations. Long before taking the aerial photographs featured in Water Views, David Ondaatje experimented with newfound perspectives through his lens. Ondaatje creatively captured aerial views as a filmmaker, and as technology continually improved, it allowed Ondaatje to photograph from elevated heights with finer and higher resolution, resulting in these large-scale works. Ondaatje's 2019 exhibition First Look at ROSEGALLERY in Los Angeles debuted his large-scale mounted prints of select aerial images.