I take photographs of things to see what they look like photographed; this is what I saw.

More than 45 years at this and I'm not done yet.

34th year of newspaper photography, the last 19 as a photo editor at The Dallas Morning News, but also shooting for said paper doing mostly personal project work. Father of three, two daughters, both graduates of UT, my alma mater. Katie is teaching 5rd grade and Claire finished her last year studying in France, came back, went to Argentina, came back and moved to LA and now returned to Dallas. I also have an 11-year-old son, Drew. And two mutts, rescues from the local dog pound.

Walking with Drew as an infant to entertain him provided the impetus to start shooting again and I started doing Holga work as a departure from my usual news photojournalism shooting with state-of-the-art gear. Having rediscovered the fun of shooting vintage-looking images through the viewfinders of old cameras (thanks TTV group), it's now my shooting technique of choice and the Holga has been relegated to seldom use.

I bought my first-ever Polaroid camera, a One Step Flash, at a Thrift Store for $4 and have pursued that approach and bought all the 660 film I can find. (It's all gone now.)

I also have a 1940's Graflex Crown Graphic that I shoot 4x5 film with.

I've recently started scanning the binders full of negatives from my newspaper jobs in Austin, Winston-Salem, Baton Rouge and Indianapolis where all my work was done on film. Imagine that: life before digital.

I often wonder what motivates me and having read what Garry Winogrand once said about photographing things to see what they look like as photographs certainly works for me.

“It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.” Henry David Thoreau

"(Professional) photographers are like hookers: at first we started doing it because we liked it and it felt good, then we kept doing it but only for our friends, and NOW we're still doing it but are charging money for doing it!" – Dean Collins

I don't do conceptual: I'm a photographer, not a Photoshopper. Wait! This traditionalist Jedi has given in to the Dark Side of the Force so now "I'm a photoshopper, not a photographer" (props to LowerDarnley for pointing that out) Oh hell, a photo artist took exception to this so now I fully accept that photography doesn't really have to include a photograph. What a concept.

I have a very difficult time talking about my work. And maybe that's a good thing.

"We became less and less inclined to talk about the photographs as we became more and more convinced that the best photographs talk for themselves, speaking in a language of their own, and that the less there is to say about a picture by way of explanation, after looking at it, the better it is as a picture."

André Kertész

“The camera doesn’t make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But, you have to SEE.” – Ernst Haas