Tidbits

When I was eight years old, my dad set me up on his studio workbench, gave me acrylic paints and a piece of glass to paint on. I painted a stylized monster truck.


When I was twelve, my grandmother took my family on a tour of Mexico. We visited Mayan pyramids. On that trip, I learned to operate a manual Nikkormat SLR camera.


I inherited my grandmother's Olympus OM-1 SLR. I took it everywhere—snapping photographs, and operating the light meter.


After I got out of the Army, I worked at a One Hour MotoPhoto. I wore one white glove. I learned to read the density of negatives and to make color corrections.


In college, my close friend Tin took artistic nude photographs. We were all so jealous.


When I graduated from College, I got a Nikon 6006 automatic SLR. I didn't read the manual. I expected the 'A' setting to mean 'automatic.'


I got a rinky-dink digital camera. Suddenly, experimentation was cheap. I never touched my beautiful Nikon 6006 again.


Using that rinky-dink camera, I made some panoramic images. I found that wide aspect ratios allowed my artistic vision of the wilderness to be captured on paper. Here is what I wrote at the time.