Some words from the photographer (i.e., me).

3/15/2002
          It's been about  three and a half  years since I picked up a camera and decided to take photography more seriously, and about twenty seven years since I started out in this life.  I think this will be a continuing statement of my feelings towards photography, or a periodic statement of my growth as a photographer, or something completely different, or all of the above.  For the moment, it will serve as a statement on from whence I have come and where I'd like to go.

          I have enjoyed taking pictures for as long as I can remember.  However, I never took it seriously until the fall of 1998.  That August I took part in a mission trip to Ciniega de Flores, Mexico.  I had never seen a landscape like the one I found in Mexico, and I tried to take as many pictures as possible.  However, all I had with me was a Kodak APS point and shoot camera with a fixed wide-angle lens.  I was very disappointed by the pictures I got back: small, flat, and relatively free of detail.  A friend of mine was on the trip as well who acted as the trip photographer,  and the image that stuck in my mind throughout the trip was of her taking pictures with an old Canon AE-1.  A month later, I pilfered the lenses from my father's old Minolta SR-T 100, bought a used Minolta X-370, and started trying to take better pictures.  A year later I pilfered my dad's camera as well, but that's neither here nor there.

          It has been an interesting process, this learning to be a photographer.  To date, I estimate that I have taken around 10,000 photographs since I bought my first SLR.  Why then, you may ask, are there only a hundred or so on the website? Simple -- some photos I take just aren't that great.  I would say my success ratio is improving dramatically.  Case in point: right now I am in the gradual process of revisiting areas of the Southwest I first photographed three years ago.  It's been very interesting so far to compare then and now.  As you can see on my Southwestern page, I took a 3-week road trip in 1999 through the Four Corners region.  I took about 1,700 photos during those three weeks, and I am only really pleased with the 26 or so of those that appear on the web page.  Flash forward to February 2002, when I revisited Moab and the surrounding parks, and out of maybe 400 photos, I am really pleased with about the same number of photos, which also appear here on the site.  Not only is that a much better success rate, the quality of my work has really improved.  After three years, I'd certainly hope it would!

          You may have noticed if you visited my home page that I am not a photographer by trade, nor do I intend to be.  I am an attorney in the Army JAG corps, currently stationed at Fort Huachuca in southeastern Arizona.  To be honest, I'm really not sure if I ever want to be a working photographer.  Photography is a release for me, a way to express myself, a way to travel someplace else without going anywhere.  I am basically afraid that turning a passion into a job would take the joy out of it.  I prefer to save it as a getaway, something I can do to leave the working week behind, if only for a day or two.

          So, well over three years after buying my first camera, here I am.  Since then I've bought and sold far too much gear, including a Mamiya medium format camera; hiked a couple of hundred miles with backpacks crammed with gear through desert, rain, and snow; and taken thousands of photographs.  They haven't all been good, to be sure, but they haven't all been bad either, and that keeps me going.  I look forward to seeing more, taking better photographs, and basically enjoying life.  I also look forward to the challenges ahead.

          Well, that's all I have for now.  As this is, after all, a photography site, I suggest you go look at some photos.