About

I’ve been taking photographs since childhood, first with a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye camera. Without much real thought, analysis, or understanding, it just interested me that I could capture a person, place or thing, a moment in time.

In college, I took two photography courses and bought a used Canon Pellix camera with a standard 50mm lens and a 200mm telephoto lens, all of which I still have. In the ’70s, it was all about black and white 35mm film. Despite the best efforts of our professor, I couldn’t comprehend Ansel Adams’ “Zone System” of calculating the proper exposure, so I just used the camera’s built-in light meter, shot frames and processed the film in the darkroom.

I don’t think I ever printed a full frame, as composed through the lens of the camera. I composed images as my film was projected on the enlarger’s board, before exposing the photo paper. My preference was always for matte finish paper – the spectrum of gray-to-black seemed somehow more pleasing, without confronting a jarring, hard black.

I was a reluctant to transition to a digital camera, never believing the technology would advance to a state that I could appreciate. But it did, of course. (I had the same reluctance to adopt wireless connectivity.)

My first digital camera was a small Fuji with a Zeiss lens, and I took this camera on a two-month walkabout around the U.S. in 2005, capturing a great many enduringly satisfying images. I traveled down the east coast, across the south, up the west coast and back across the northern part of the country.

Now I capture images with my iPhone 13 Pro or a Sony Alpha 6300 DSLR camera.

My life, in brief…

My life started in Seattle, on a Wednesday in April 1951. It most likely rained. My family moved east when I was four and I did most of my growing up in the Connecticut suburbs, about 30 miles from midtown Manhattan. It was a different world then. I began my quest for a college degree in 1969, at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, just after Woodstock and the first moon landing, and seven years later I earned a BA in Humanities from the University of Maine in Presque Isle, which my father said didn’t qualify me for anything, although I believed it prepared me well for anything. For more than 40 years, I meandered along a career path in the broad field of marketing and communication, mostly in the realm of nonprofit arts and culture organizations. Along the way I’ve had some pretty remarkable experiences, including marrying an extraordinary woman and bringing children into the world. The Maine coast has felt like home to me for many years, and I’m grateful every day to live here, by the cold salt water in a thriving and beautiful community.