Guidenet

I'm a 62 year old corporate photographer who has also been a software engineer. My academia is largely based on Vision and my dissertation was on Fluids. I have a small studio and gallery which I enjoy on occasion. My specialty is bird photography, and I've been lucky to have had a few attempts published over the years. I work for a large Fortune 500 company as their in-house photographer for the communications, publicity and care departments. I also do their corporate meetings and events. As the company owns several television stations, I sometimes get an assignment to do some journalistic work, though this is fortunately rare.

My gal Jan, of over 20 years, is also an avid photographer, and I have a daughter who is a successful Wedding Photographer. As I get closer to retirement, I've taken more and more shooting contracts, but only those I enjoy like the local little league baseball teams. I occasionally act as a cruise photographer for some of the cruise lines here in Florida when requested by organizations.

I also spend more and more time teaching basic photography for several resources locally. I'm seriously passionate about people learning exposure and the Zone System of Photography before considering themselves sufficiently astute in this craft. I’ve held several Zone System Workshops over the years as well as one Cruise based workshop. I’m also passionate about Ansel Adams’ ideas about pre-visualization. Pressing the shutter button and the camera are just one small part of the image creation process.

I started at eight years old in 1959 when my dad and I built a darkroom, him more than me. My father taught me the Zone System at a very young age. I continued as a youthful photographer, buying glass with lawn mowing money through my high school and then into college with odd jobs. I paid most of my tuition as an undergraduate shooting weddings and baby pictures as well as for the university newspaper. Many of those years I shot 4x5, 5x7 and 8x10 field cameras and sheet film. In small format, I shot Pentax until 1968 when I switched to Nikon, needing a better more professional system tool. I still shoot Nikon today as well as Nikkor lenses for some of my large format gear. I also mostly shoot digital but still maintain a darkroom for up to 5x7 format. 8x10 is stored in the attic and is only black and white. I even have a Nikkor enlarging lens. Over the years, I believe Nikon has been instrumental on the creation of truly great glass.