Scroll down to read my brief photographic biography.   

I am not a professional photographer, but I have been taking photographs for as long as I can remember.  My earliest camera was a Kodak Instamatic.  Outdoors, you kept the sun at your back so your shots weren’t burned out.  For indoor shooting, the flashcube was an indispensable accessory.  Just point and shoot. 

My first 35mm camera was a Kodak Retina 1a that I got from my father.  I took a lot of pictures with that camera during my college years, none of them very good.  The negatives are still buried in a trunk somewhere in the house.  In 1977 I bought a Minolta SRT 201, and that was when I became serious about my photography, meaning I really began to try to understand the elements of exposure, composition and creative expression.  I still have both of those 35mm film cameras, although the Kodak has long since ceased to function, and I have not used the Minolta in years.  I have had a few other film cameras over the ensuing decades:  35mm units by Minolta, Olympus and Nikon, as well as a medium format Mamiya. 

I started shooting digital with a Sony Cybershot in the early 2000’s, and subsequently moved on to Nikon equipment, which is my standard kit today.  My original D100 has been replaced by a D2Xs, and I recently acquired a D3.  I have a number of lenses, but rely chiefly on my Nikkor 17-55mm zoom on the D2Xs and a Nikkor 70-200 VR zoom on the D3.  Other lenses include a Tamron 300-500 zoom, as well as several fixed focal length Nikkor lenses.

I process my photographs using Photoshop CS3 as a digital darkroom.  The vast majority of my shots are minimally processed by adjustments to levels, brightness, contrast, color balance and saturation.  Some images are cropped for compositional improvement, and/or cloned to remove dust specs or other distracting elements.  Certain images look better in black and white, and many of these are rendered with tinting to warm the overall appearance of the shot.  Occasionally I experiment with some of Photoshop’s exotic editing functions, but these are exceptions to my normal approach.