I was upgrading to the new Lightroom Classic CC in early 2018 and couldn't get a photo to upload to Flickr. So, I deleted my Flickr stuff in Lightroom on my computer to speed the process up. Little did I realize, but I was also deleting years of photos on Flickr back to 2014. I lost everything I had uploaded using Lightroom (and that's nearly everything I post) from 2014 until 2018 (probably 2,000 - 3,000 photos). Darn! I have been bringing back some old photos and adding some new, but I am crushed that I lost all of the communications I engaged in and more than 150 photos that had been selected to be on Flickr Explore, etc. (e.g., a few photos had over 2,000 favorites and countless comments). Sigh.

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I am a professor who teaches at a public university in Michigan. In my free time, I shoot photography. A lot. I like to think I've grown quite a bit since I started focusing more on photography. On Jan. 1 of 2011, I decided to shoot a photo a day for fun. By that summer, I realized that my camera phone wasn't going to do the trick for the shots I wanted. As I bought new cameras and lenses, I wanted to better learn how to use the equipment, so I studied exposure, light, and composition and generally came to love photography. If you take the time to look through my portfolio, you should easily see my growth from 2011 to today. And you'll see I still have room to grow and grow.

I now shoot with a Sony A7RII and prime lenses (e.g., FE Zeiss 55/1.8, Batis 85/1.8, Contax G 90/2.8, Voigtlander Nokton 35/1.2 II, Rokinon 135/2). I previously shot with a Canon 6D for nearly a year. I also own a Sony NEX-5N with an assortment of lenses (AF and legacy MF glass). I've even added a Canon AE-1 film camera. I often take photographs of the nuance in life . . . I want to find the extraordinary in the ordinary.

I never liked shooting landscape and I wasn't good at it for the first 5-6 years of my journey or so. I was really more focused on people for much of my photography tenure; people and just things, so to speak. But during during 2016, I started to shoot more landscape. I saw it as a new challenge (and it is). Producing images that please me is fun. That's my goal. ;-)