I truly love photography, have since I was very young, the photographs of others as well as being involved in the process itself. I have come to realize that in this I am perhaps more journalist than artist, bent on recording what I see, conveying what I think and feel about it, more than creating a new thing. I am a bit of a primitive cave painter - very much like to voyage into the world, but also like to sit in a cave next to a fire and scrawl on the wall, and maybe tell a few stories while I do.

My father greatly influenced my interest in photography, in that we traveled widely when I was young, and lived in various regions of the world. We frequently would review our travels through his Kodachrome slides. He would later lend me his Kodak 35mm SLR, which I would take up into the wooded hill behind our house at the edge of the small mid-western US town where we lived... along the Mississippi flyway. He had three lenses, as I recall – a 28mm, a 50mm, and a 125mm. My mother had a Yashica twin lens reflex.

In the summer of 1974, I worked as a hod carrier for a non-union block mason building basements for barns, churches and homes. I saved my earnings and purchased my first 35mm SLR, a Yashica TL Electro X, in anticipation of 5 months of foreign travel.

Many cameras have come and gone since, various types and with cycling levels of complexity and expense. In this I have enjoyed the idea of achieving as much as I can with whatever equipment is in my hand.