When I was about twelve my grandmother decided we needed to learn how to develop film. That meant I had to take pictures, which i was glad to do. We set up a make-shift photo lab in the basement and developed our first roll of black and white film. The quality wasn't much, but it was a beginning. In college I majored in art and used photography to help out with subject matter for my painting. My senior year was a photographer for the college newspaper. I also learned there was an unused photo lab in the physics department and was allowed to use it at my discretion, provided I clean up the layers of dust that had settled. I learned the fundamentals of photography on a 2 1/4" square Yashica Mat twin-lens camera. The square format is still my favorite. Many years later a friend took me kicking and screaming into the world of digital photography and now I cannot thank him enough. While watercolor painting is my main form of expression, and consider myself a painter and not a photographer, I still love photography and try to practice the art form regularly.