I was introduced to photography while in high school. While visiting a friend whose brother was a photographer for the local newspaper, I saw one of his black and white prints of a local church lying on a table. That image so intrigued me that I asked him about it. The next thing I knew, I was in his basement darkroom getting a crash course in printing. I saved my money and acquired a used Pentax Spotmatic along with some basic darkroom equipment and began teaching myself photography.

I choose to work with traditional methods, using large format field cameras and black and white film. I love the feel of a hand crafted wood and brass camera built to last a lifetime, and the time spent under the focusing cloth exploring an inverted and reversed composition on the ground glass. I enjoy the mental challenge of taking light readings and determining how I can translate my readings to tonal values on the print. I love the sound of a precision mechanical shutter that’s older than me timing an exposure and the separation between releasing the shutter and the rediscovery of the image on a beautiful 4x5 or 8x10 inch silver negative processed in a homebrewed developer. I look forward to the quiet hours spent in the darkroom creating a silver print, watching the image slowly and magically appear in the developer under the amber glow of the safelight, then holding a fine black and white print that forces you to look at the subject in a new way. You see shapes, forms, and textures often hidden by distracting colors. For these reasons, and many more, I choose to work in this slow, contemplative, hands-on method because it’s what I enjoy and it seems to works for me.

I usually don’t set out with an image in mind, I explore an area looking for things that want to be photographed. I look for things that “speak” to me. Sometimes I hear them, sometimes I may not understand what they’re trying to say, and sometimes I think they lie to me. In any event, my goal is to produce an image that will not just let you see what I saw, but to hear what I heard, and hopefully, to feel what I felt.