“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” – Ansel Adams

I am a photographer based in the Albuquerque, New Mexico area.  I specialize in Fine Art, Landscape, Wildlife, Portrait, Event, Real Estate photography and Photo Retouching.

My photography journey started when I was a young child with my family’s Kodak Brownie Hawkeye that I sometimes got to use.  When I was 12 my older brother gave me an Argus A-four that he picked up while in the Navy.  It was a very simple totally manual adjustment 35mm camera, no light meter and a simple view finder.  I used that camera for several years and learned about depth of field, how to expose properly, how to estimate distance and how to process black & white film.  In 1976 I bought my first SLR and took a black & white photography class at the Cedar Rapids Art Museum.  Until then photography was just taking a snapshot and putting the print in drawer or album.  During that class I began to see things differently, to quote Frank Herbert – “Without change something sleeps inside us and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”.  I was introduced to the works of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Diane Arbus, Margaret Bourke-White, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Minor White and others, to this day I still go to their works when I am seeking inspiration.

In 1982 my wife and I decided that we had lived through enough Iowa and Minnesota winters, so we moved to New Mexico and fell in love with “The Land of Enchantment”.  Of course, being in the Albuquerque area means I have taken a lot of photos of hot air balloons and mountains.  Working in IT as a programmer and technical support specialist for most of my career meant that I didn’t get out to photograph as much as I would have liked to, but I was able to get out on the occasional weekend.  Now that I am retired that is rapidly changing.  I did start playing with digital in 1997 when Sony came out with the Mavica, 0.3 Mega-pixels on a 3.5” floppy disk and had several small digital point and shoots, however the quality was not there yet so I stayed with film.  In 2014 I could see that digital was taking over so I bought my first digital DSLR, starting learning Lightroom and Photoshop.  Not having a dedicated darkroom meant that I had to rely on photo labs for processing film and making prints.  With my digital darkroom I am now totally in control of my art for the first time in years.  When we travel the darkroom essentially comes with us in the form of a laptop, monitor and printer.

I still get out and shoot a roll of black and white film to force myself to slow down and really think about what I am seeing.  One of my ongoing projects is scanning negatives that I have taken in the past.