For seventeen years I took pictures but for the last fourty years plus I’ve been making Photographs. I first became interested in Photography while serving with the U.S.Army in the early seventies. I had received training in and was doing sound recording for training films when I realized that my ear and the microphone didn’t hear things in the same way. To achieve good results I had to teach my ear to listen like a microphone. I had to hear beyond the sounds I wanted, to the noise that the ear perceives but the brain filters. I soon realized my eye was the same way and that I could teach myself to see using the tools that mimic vision. I bought a 35 mm camera with some black and white film and started. The camera came with an operating manual and in those days Kodak included a small pamphlet detailing basic hints about exposing and developing with each roll of film. The military post had a fine darkroom so I was totally vertically integrated from the start. Armed with that knowledge I began to take pictures of the people and things around me. I did that for several years, going back and forth between black/white and color film pointing the camera at things and snapping away. It was only after I examined the slides or prints that I could see what I had a picture of. I had to take a long break in printing during which I got my career path in order but I still did what picture taking that I could. I looked at my pictures and I had some nice ones but mostly I had a lot of “if only”. I thought I had limited control. The camera after all was only a machine that could do so much. No machine can replace the eye and there was a limit to what the camera could record. I felt that I couldn’t control events and when my eye saw something beautiful that I should take a picture. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. I would chalk it up to experience and say better luck next time. Eventually that experience paid off and I realized that I did have total control, despite all the other variables I did have control over the decision to take a picture or not take a picture when my eye saw something. I guess I’m a little slow because I had to think about that for a while and I stopped taking pictures altogether. About twenty years ago I decided I was ready so I built a new darkroom and bought a new camera. I bought a used 4×5 inch bellows type camera that requires a more disciplined approach. It’s big and heavy, hard to use and film is expensive but I love what it does and I have control. I have since moved on to 8×10 that is bigger, heavier, more expensive, and more disciplined. Now, I make Photographs
About ten years ago I purchased my first digital camera. The ease and the spontaneity of the digital medium have expanded the gamut of my work and prompted a revamp of this website.
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