I retired from a full time job on 10/31/03 and immediately went to MI the next day to photograph with my very good friend, Gary Martin! I'm 78 and celebrated my 50th wedding anniversary with my husband, Dan (81 on 6/3/20), on 2/27/22. We have 1 daughter, Maria, 42. I consider myself a semi-professional photographer as I have sold some of my photographs and what I call photographic products. I've been photographing since June 1962 and started with a Kodak Brownie 1-button camera. I last shot with a Canon Rebel G 2000 and a Canon Elan-7NE, both film cameras and mostly shot with Fuji Provia 100F slide film, but used Fuji Velvia 50 for low light sunrise/sunset/moonset shots and Fuji Provia 400F when shooting birds/ducks/swans. I used both a UV and/or a circular polarizing filter, depending on the light and sometimes a warming filter. I had 4 Canon lenses: 17-35mm, 24-85mm, 75-300mm and 100mm macro and a 2x teleconverter until our house fire on 2/17/18, but need to replace the 100mm macro and the 2x teleconverter. I didn't try to recover them from our burned house and decided to buy them new once we resituated ourselves in a new house. I usually carried 1 camera with the 24-85mm lens on it and the 75-300mm with at least 4 rolls of film in a mini-pack which also served as a shoulder purse. As I haven't been able to find a photolab that still processes slide film, I first tried some 1-time cameras and now have been using some "regular film" which I'm been able to have processed at a local Walgreens with a cd provided. When I shot in Boston or other fairly local areas in Massachusetts, I usually used a camera case, but when traveling further afield, I used a camera backpack with a waist strap that allowed me to carry everything with me without too much trouble (because of the waist strap).

Some of my photos of my friend, Gary Martin, can be found on his website, www.coastalbeacons.com. At one point, thanks to Thad Roan (Bridgepix on Flickr), some of lighthouse catwalk/footbridge and suspension bridges along with articles on them, had been added to his blog on his website, www.bridgepix.com, which I think is no longer there. I have had 5 exhibits of some of my work; 2 in Kalamazoo, MI with other photographers and artists in galleries and 2 in libraries in Tewksbury and Lowell, MA of just my photographs. I also had a month-long gallery show of entirely my photographs in June 2012 in a gallery in Arlington, MA, which was my 50th year photographing.

I particularly like to shoot natural abstracts and odd-angled perspectives of glass reflective buildings and other architecture and reflections, but I do shoot a variety of other subjects as well. I had 1 of my cameras and 2 of the lenses with me when the Tewksbury Fire Investigator recovered my purse from the side of the house where the main fire happened. I've tried to use it, but I think it may be lost as far as using it again although I might try to send it to Canon to try and see if it can be fixed. I still have 2 of the lenses and have used them with the used cameras that I purchased from Amazon. I decided to leave my camera backpack with the other camera and lenses is on the other side of the house away from the burned side and buy new equipment. I was able to salvage most of my matted and framed photos which were in the PODS at the house of the Billerica builder who bought our house on March 15, 2019. We have since received the PODS on June 1, 2019 at our new home in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. I bought a new photo software program that I have been attempting to learn to use as well as a new desktop computer as well as the laptop I bought in March 2018. I also bought a new film and slice scanner but have been told what I'm trying to use is not correct. I need to re-scan slides that were salvaged from our old burned house.