This is by far the toughest of my web pages to write as I have been
taking photographs on a serious level since at least the early 1980's
and have literally hundreds of photos
stashed away in boxes and photo albums. The problem is that most of my
photos aren't in digital format. They are prints that I would first have
to scan and upload to the web. A lot of my photos were processed in my
own lab and a good number of them are black and white. My ultimate plan
is to scan some of my better ones and upload them to my Flickr account.
I started seriously taking photos
sometime in the early 1980's when my wife (at that time) bought me a
Mamiya ZE, which at the time was a state-of-the-art 35mm SLR camera. The
neat thing was that it could used in fully automatic mode, where the
photographer simply had to point an shoot. 9 times out of 10, the result
was a beautiful shot. The camera could also be using in fully manual
mode, when auto mode wasn't appropriate. I still have this camera today,
along with a dedicated
Mamiya Sekor E 2,8 /28mm lens and a
Mamiya Sekor E 4,0 /80-200 telephoto lens.
At one
time, I also had a fairly impressive black and white processing lab set
up at my mother-laws-house. I consider a lot of my black and white
photography to be some of the best work I have ever done. The
possibilities seemed to be endless when one could manipulate the
enlarging and developing process. I did a lot of experimenting with time
exposures, dodging and burning, etc.
Then
digital photography came along making a developing lab expensive and
kind of a hassle. I started fiddling around with Photoshop, Fireworks
and other software tools and found photograph restoration to be very
rewarding. It is always gratifying to take an old, trashed photo and
bring it back to new condition. Right now I use Macromedia Fireworks and
a Wacom graphics tablet
for my restoration needs.
So what
you see here are just a few, representative photos that I've taken over
the years. Larger views of these photos can be found on my Flickr page
and I hope you'll go over
and take a look. Please visit again sometime and maybe I will have
scanned some of my old black and whites by then. By the way, all of the
photos on this page were taken with my wife's Kodak Z740 5 megapixel camera.