        
About Me: Photography
this page last modified on Monday, August 18, 2008
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Kirsten holds our daughter Morey for the first time.
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I like to take pictures. One of my goals in life is to take great pictures, but it's hard. I once applied for a job as a photographer with this resume, but I was asking for too much money. It seems the jobs that pay the least are often the jobs you'd most like to have.
During my first two years in Hawaii, I took about 10,000 photos (in an era without digital cameras).
I spent the summer of 1988 at Cornell University moving furniture and cleaning bathrooms to earn the money to buy my first camera (a Canon EOS 650, the very first EOS). Over the years, I've had five professional cameras and lots of lenses. The most recent lens I bought cost more than my first car. I need professional lenses because of the demands I put on them (like getting knocked around while leaning out of an open helicopter at 100 knots, trying to zoom in to a small subject with a telephoto lens).
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A long-exposure at Homer High School in which my friend Mark Haskins was waving a lit highway flare.
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Beginning in the fall of 1988, I studied technical photography for a year at Rochester Institute of Technology (a premier photography school). No digital cameras or Adobe Photoshop back then, everything was analog and manual. They taught us the "Old School" methods: how to pick out the right film, how to use a light meter to calculate reflectance and illuminance (show your math!), how to do exposure compensation (show your math again!), how to use chemicals and darkrooms, how to dodge and burn, how to use grain enlargers, and more. I'm not kidding when I say "show your math". I don't shoot film anymore, but the training was invaluable. My professors were Photo Gods.
I've experimented with all kinds of photography -- infrared, underwater, astronomical and special effects. I especially enjoy aerial photography.
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