I first became interested in photography in the early 70’s when my dad bought a 35mm Minolta SRT 102. After begging for quite some time, he finally decided to let me use it. When I got my first roll of film developed and saw how good the pictures were I fell in love with photography. I read a few books and took a basic photography class. I shot a lot of photos mostly of friends, family, bugs and flowers. I lost interest after a while and just shot on special occasions.

In 1995, when I married my best friend Terri, I bought a Nikon N90s and a Sb28 flash. Still, my interest was just for shooting those special occasions. Then I found Ebay. Digital photography was on the scene by then and I bought my first digital camera in 2001, a Sony Mavica FD95, just so I could start selling on Ebay. My addiction to photography didn’t start until 2004, when I bought my second digital camera, a Nikon D8800. That’s when I started getting serious about digital photography because I could shoot those 30 shots and delete all of them if I wanted to.

Sometime later after saving, scraping & selling all my junk on Ebay I purchased a Nikon D300, which is what I am using know. It’s awesome. Maybe someday I will upgrade to full frame, Nikon of course.

Shorty after joining Flickr, I starting shooting HDR and processing with Photomatix, Onone and Topaz. I like shooting urban decay, abandoned buildings, landscapes and anything else that I can get permission to shoot. In the future, I hope to improve my skills on photographing people.

I attended two of Richard Bernabe’s workshops, a fall workshop and another at Hunting Island State Park, South Carolina. Richard is a great teacher and guide. I learned a lot and he got us into some great places at just the right time. I really enjoyed these and I would recommend his workshops and classes to anyone who is interested in learning landscape photography.

I have fun meeting up with my friends and “photo junkies”, Tony Brown and Ken Toney. We have been doing urban exploration around Spartanburg. We are also members of Spartanburg Photo Guild. A special thanks to Ken for teaching me some of the “good stuff”.

I hope you enjoy my photos and I welcome your comments and critiques’.