By Mary L. Grady

One day last month, photographer and businessman Roger Ressmeyer was up at 4 a.m. pulling together a digital video presentation and assembling equipment for an important shoot. Despite years of experience photographing everything from rock stars to erupting volcanos, he was anxious. It was his day to be the art docent for his son Ryan’s kindergarten class.

“I was nervous,” he admitted.

A world-renowned photographer, Ressmeyer, 52, has begun a new business on Mercer Island in a tiny suite of offices above the Lakeview Four Seasons Drycleaners. The endeavor, named Science Faction, is in the business of enhancing and marketing photographic images for sale to commercial and scientific users.

His fastidious preparation for the day with the kindergartners was not out of the ordinary for Ressmeyer.

His photographs are awe-inspiring, often astonishing and sometimes funny — but never effortless. Nothing about capturing events or people on film is left to chance. Ressmeyer’s work and life are the products of elaborate planning and a lifetime of almost obsessive attention to detail.

Ressmeyer has borne the intense heat of lava flows of the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii, stood atop the girders of the Golden Gate Bridge and on stage with the Grateful Dead. He has photographed Bill Gates, Dolly Parton and Carlos Santana. He holds the credits for numerous album covers and shot features and covers for Rolling Stone, People, Smithsonian and National Geographic magazines. And despite the deliberate nature of his photography, his work always reveals something unique, spontaneous and unexpected.

A Ressmeyer shoot might take weeks or even months of preparation, he explained. A shot of the total eclipse of the sun in 1990 from a mountaintop in Hawaii took six years of planning and wrangling for permission. As the time approached, Ressmeyer and his crew lugged 23 cameras and hundreds of pounds of equipment to 14,000 feet, spent weeks acclimating to the altitude, then climbed to 16,000 feet to set up and shoot the event.

“We then had four minutes,” he said. The photo, of a solar eclipse, was selected as a National Geographic’s “100 Best Photos of All Time.”

Ressmeyer is fastidious about his health as well.

An insulin-dependent diabetic from the age of 14, he watches his diet and tests his blood sugar six times a day.

After more than 20 years dashing about the planet, with little sleep and two failed marriages, he wanted to step back. He sold his photography collection and stock photo business in 1995 to Bill Gates’ Corbis Corporation — the company’s first major acquisition. He then joined the corporate world, working at Corbis and later, Getty Images.

Unlike many photographers at the time, Ressmeyer owned the rights to all of his images.

“It shocked the photo community,” he said of the move. “And it changed my life.”

His move into marketing images rather than making them, has lead to his new venture representing the work of other photographers.

A Lutheran minister’s son, Ressmeyer, grew up on Long Island, New York, with three older sisters.

Intrigued by the space race of the 1960s, he wanted to become an astronaut. He built his own telescopes to track the planets in his backyard and became skilled with optics.

He began working as a photographer in high school not long after he was diagnosed with diabetes. His hopes for a career in space were dashed.

“I had wanted to be an astronaut,” he said of the news. “I was depressed for a long time.”

Self-conscious, the camera granted him an entree back into the world. He became a photographer for his high school, working in a dark room over the principal’s office.

He attended Yale University intending to study science and astronomy but ended up with finishing a degree in psychology. After all, it was the ’60s, he reminds his visitor. It was the time to rebel.

While he was still at Yale, Ressmeyer was introduced to Jan Werner of Rolling Stone magazine. Werner arranged for him to take photos of Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane, later the Jefferson Starship. From his association with Slick and her band, his work grew to include many bands of the San Francisco Sound. His celebrity photos lead to work for the then-new People magazine and later, Newsweek. But his fascination with space and science remained.

He and a handful of other chosen photographers took photos of the first shuttle launch. His work for Smithsonian and National Geographic are clearly a combination of technology and nature.

And there have been people and places out of bounds to nearly everyone else — Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs for Fortune Magazine and Bill Gates for his book cover, “The Road Ahead.” He was hired by the government to document the people and weaponry inside secret military installations.

He later photographed stars of a different kind, two leading scientists of the last century: Chemist and two- time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, and nuclear physicist Edward Teller.

Ressmeyer is not without a view of himself of the demanding and sometimes-insolent artist.

“I am the ragged edge of brilliance and paranoia,” he said with a smile. “I have the left brain-right brain combination.”

“I have been rewarded for being obnoxious,” he explained of his ability to bring out the unexpected in his models. “It has helped my work.”

And because of it, he knows photography and the photographers. They trust their images with him to alter or market as he sees fit.

The images entrusted to Science Faction range from photos taken with an electron microscope or with lenses that can bring distant planets into focus. Some photos show the growth of cancerous cells, the drift of dandelion fluff in the breeze or an aging star nebula millions of miles away from Earth.

His own focus has turned toward family and community now.

He married again several years ago and has a son. He and his wife are soon to adopt 18-month-old Rachel Lin from China.

“Things have happened to me beyond my imagination,” he said as much as about his personal life as his professional one.

The presentation to the kindergartners included a chance for everyone to take a portrait of a classmate, and be a model. It is important to know both sides of the camera, he said.