My earliest memories of photography was high school, where I took black and white photographs for the yearbook. I remember the hours spent with chemicals, tanks and trays and the wonderful enlarger that could take you places you didn’t know existed. It was fun, at least for a teenager!

My next encounter with photography was with a Canon AE-1 fitted with a niffty 50mm f/1.4 lens that I used to take slides (yea, Ektachrome 64 to be exact, and yes I also did film, Velvia 50 which I loved for the richness of the colors). Thousands of slides later, I still have that camera. Many of my photographs from my time in Spain, Italy and Greece still survive as Ektachrome 64 slides that I will someday scan into digital.

All photography is about light. All photographers state that they “paint” with light. I look for more than just light, I look for textures, tones and colors. I find that the quality of light at the moment I click the shutter will bring out or reveal a color, tone or texture that wasn’t obvious just minutes before and will disappear minutes after. I revel in the gloriousness of the world around me, and sometimes I feel like a kid in awe of the simple beauty that I see before me.

I now capture and print images digitally – the same eye that I developed as a younger man but hopefully a wiser eye, bringing out the subtle or bold colors depending on how I have envisioned the photograph. I process each photograph to bring out special qualities of the scene as I remembered it. 

However, none of this is important if the photographs don’t engage you, don’t grab you, don’t claim you. Each one is an invitation to participate in a story. I just don’t take photographs, I make photographs – ‘memories’ of places and scenes that I share and pass on to you.

Peace,