I have been a photographer for over 40 years, shooting sports, theater, portraits, and events. I have done some work with models but I'm interested in learning and expanding my focus by learning from others who have experience they are willing to pass on. I have some portraiture work and other types of photography where I've worked with models that I will share as I begin getting settled in and learning more about this forum, and hopefully some of you will be able to give me the benefit of your experience by helping me make my work better.

Much of my past work has been more of an editorial or documentary style in which images involving people captured them in whatever activity they were doing at the time, whether that was participating in a sporting event, demonstrating a skill or a product, running for political office, getting arrested, etc. While all of these areas involve people, the people were not models and my purpose was to document moments in time however they played out, not to create these moments. While I will continue making photographs that tell the stories of others, I have developed an interest in using photography to tell some stories of my own, or to create images of my choosing to convey a mood, thought, or emotion of my choosing and and execution. It is that interest that has brought me to a place where I have begun working with models.

I joined Model Mayhem to learn about working with models and to see how other photographers and models work together to create the images they create, to try and glean some of the nuts and bolts level of knowledge and expertise that is second nature to many of you who have years of experience working with models. At present, I'm interested in working with models to shoot images would be categorized as editorial, documentary, or conceptual in nature.

I have been involved in photography at some level since I was handed a camera and a press card in 1975 to shoot high school football games for my hometown newspaper at the staggering sum of $15 each and every week. I have no formal education in photography and I am largely self-taught, but did have the good fortune to have had three mentors take an interest in me at three different periods of my life to teach me some of what they knew. My first mentor was the sports editor of my hometown newspaper. He taught me the basics of the camera settings and how to develop the film and the prints and suddenly, a whole new world opened up to me. After that, I only cared about the football games because after the game I would get to spend hours in the newspaper darkroom watching magic unfold right before my eyes. I've been hooked ever since. The technology may have changed in the intervening years, but the experience of merging what the camera sees with the image in my head at the moment the shutter moves across the image plane is just as magical as it was on that September night in 1975 when the safe light switch was thrown and I watched a blank, white sheet of photo paper begin to darken and slowly reveal the image that was burned into it for the very first time.

I may use Windows 10 and Adobe Photoshop to do what I used to do with Beseler and Kodak, but that hasn't affected my infatuation with the alchemy of photography, which is why I still do it and why I try to learn something and be just a little better every day.

It ain't the money or the hours, that's for sure.

I look forward to learning from you and perhaps, in time, working with some of you.

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