I currently live in "The Valley of the Sun", Phoenix, Arizona, USA with my wife, Marsha, and 17 year old daughter, Jennifer. In all, my wife and I have raised four children, three of whom (Jerod, Chris, and Melissa) have begun lives and families of their own. We are happy with, and proud of, our family. Our two sons and our oldest daughter have made us grandparents five times over.

I have been involved in serious photography for nearly 40 years. I began a serious interest while I was in the 8th grade in elementary school. Thanks to the interest of a dedicated teacher, Robert Roseveer, I processed my first roll of film and made my first black and white contact prints. What a heady experience for an 8th grader! I was hooked! I spent many years thereafter acquiring the skills to produce black and white images suitable for gallery presentation. My heroes were, of course, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Fred Picker. Shortly after college I went to work for an aerial photography company. The aerial photography company had a full-service, on site color and black and white photo lab for the production of aerial images. Gradually I drifted away from black and white photography and availed myself of the color lab in my off times. I began photographing with medium format and large format cameras and produced large color landscapes up to 40" x 60" for sale to individuals and home decorators.

When my tenure with the aerial photography company came to end I gave up large format photography and returned to using the 35mm camera full time. Although I worked for a large photofinishing company afterwards it was too difficult to schedule use of the color labs in my off times. I had always kept a 35mm system through the years and did manage to amass a relatively significant number of 35mm images. However, whether I was using 35mm, 4.5cm x 6cm, 4"x5", or 8"x10" film I was never quite satisfied that the images I made were representative of the scene as I perceived the scene or subject. Film has many shortcomings, one of which is the expense. Film and processing are expensive and I felt limited in the numbers of images I could affordably capture. Probably more despairing tome is the limited dynamic range of tones that can be captured on a single exposure. Either the highlights were much too light and textureless or the dark shadows were too black and without details. I certainly never viewed my subjects with such limitations.

When affordable, digital film scanners became available to the general public I spent many, many hours scanning my transparencies and negatives. New limitations appeared. Shadowed areas I scanned contained a great deal of digital "noise". I could pull out additional details from the shadows but the digital noise degraded the shadow areas even worse than leaving the shadow areas blank. I experimented with making multiple exposures of a single scene and compositing those exposures in Photoshop to create a single photograph with an extended range of tones. This was tedious, time consuming work and the results were not always as I expected.

I watched the steady progress made in manufacturing and marketing digital cameras. Still, I was not impressed with the images made with the typical pro-sumer cameras. Tiny sensors, although containing high numbers of pixels, still produced a large amount of digital noise in the shadow areas. Exposures still had to be carefully controlled to provide adequate highlight details. Advances were made in a short time and I began to take notice of the digital SLR cameras manufactured by Canon Inc. The Canon EOS D30 was being hailed as a breakthrough camera. I would have purchased this camera if it weren't so expensive at the time it was introduced...$2,995.00!! For only 3.25 megapixels, this camera had to become much, much less expensive for me to be able to take advantage of a dSLR!

Of course, with all of the advances in digital cameras there resulted in advances in the software used to manipulate those images. Things were beginning to look up to me! Adobe Photoshop continued to offer more and more features with each version change and software was becoming available to correct for lens distortions and to correct perspective in images. Most importantly, to me, were programs being developed to combine individual exposures into a single image with an extended tonal range. Finally, I was taking notice!

In 2004 I purchased a used Canon EOS D30 for 1/10th of what the camera cost new. I have to say, this was the best investment of my life. With a few memory cards and a home computer I could finally make images without the expense of buying film and paying for processing. More importantly, I began to experiment with software that would allow combining several images of a subject with differing exposures into a single image with the tonal ranges that I saw when making the image. After a year of using the D30 I was so impressed with the quality of the images I have subsequently purchased a Canon EOS Rebel XT, a Canon EOS 20D, and a Canon EOS 1D Mark II camera which has become my "workhorse" camera. I am now making the best images of my career. In fact, my images now better reflect so much how I view a scene or subject that I have forsaken all of my old film images and am concentrating solely on making new images.

Equipment:

Avian, Wildlife, and Dragonfly Photography...

• Canon EOS 1D Mark II dSLR camera (primary birding and landscape camera)
• Canon EOS 40D dSLR camera (secondary birding and primary dragonfly camera)
• Canon EOS 20D dSLR camera (back-up camera)
• Canon BG-E2 vertical grip and battery compartment (for 40D and 20D dSLRs)
• Canon EF 500mm f 4L IS lens (primary bird photography lens)
• Canon EF 300mm f 4L IS lens (for dragonfly and bird flight photography)
• Canon EF 70-200mm f 4L non-IS lens (habitat and landscape images)
• Contax/Zeiss Vario-Sonnar 35mm-70mm zoom lens (for landscape images)
• Canon EF 17-40mm f 4L zoom lens (for habitat and landscape images)
• Canon EF 100mm f 2.8 macro lens (flower and macro-photography)
• Canon EF 1.4x II teleconverter
• Canon EF 2x II teleconverter
• Kenko 1.4x TelePlus PRO 300 DG teleconverter (used "stacked" with Canon EF 1.4x II tc on 30D dSLR)
• Canon EF extension tubes 12mm and 25mm
• Canon 550ex electronic flash with Better Beamer
• Really Right Stuff BH-40 ball head
• Jobu Black Widow Heavy Duty gimbal head
• Gitzo G-1325 Mountaineer carbon fiber tripod
• Velbon El Carmagne 630A carbon fiber tripod
• Zeiss 8 x 30 B MC Diafun binoculars