photographer who has worked for the Los Angeles
Times, the Kansas City Star and the International Herald
Tribune in Paris. He grew up as an “airline brat,”
traveling with his family—and later alone—around the
world. He acquired his first camera, a Kodak Duoflex,
when he was about eight years old, later borrowed his
father’s Leica—which he subsequently lost in Nepal—
and then moved on to Speed Graphic press cameras.
He earned his first money in photography as a high
school sports photographer selling freelance work to the
Kansas City Star. As a student at Kansas State
University, he was a photographer for the student
newspaper, the daily Collegian, where he later served as
editor. When the People to People program was
launched, he joined the staff and was recruited by the
Carl Byoir agency to photograph and write about student
ambassadors in Europe. In the U.S. Army at Ft. Sill,
Oklahoma, he worked in the Public Information Office
and often shot motion picture film for a television station
in Lawton, Oklahoma. After leaving the Army he became
editor of Grass & Grain, a mid-Kansas farm weekly,
where he was also the sole photographer.
As a reporter at the Kansas City Star, he was often
assigned to the Saturday night police beat. Instead of
covering the beat from the police station as was
customary, he roamed the city in a car equipped with
police radios and a press camera, offering his editors both
words and pictures.
As an editor at the Los Angeles Times, he often provided
feature photographs shot on his off hours and
occasionally was in a position to bring in spot news
photographs, as was the case when the oil tanker
Sansinena exploded in the Los Angeles Harbor.
Since the early 1970s he has worked almost exclusively
with 35-millimeter film and digital cameras. After leaving
the Times in 2004 he concentrated on landscapes and
fine art photography. His work now is represented by 10
international stock agencies, which market digital files on
the Internet.
His photography and writing has been published in
newspapers and magazines as well as on the Internet. He
lives in Los Angeles with his family but continues to
travel widely.
Nature and landscape are compelling themes for
photography, and they have been among my passions since
childhood. I became fascinated by light and how it could
change the appearance of people and objects. Though I use
artificial lights and strobes when necessary, I developed
much more interest in subjects that lend themselves to
natural illumination. Thus, my work encompasses not only
landscapes and other “nature” subjects, but also people in
natural, often candid, circumstances.
Almost all of my work now involves color images, but I
honed processing and printing skills on monochromes in a
chemical darkroom. Dodging and burning on enlarged
images was standard practice in the traditional darkroom,
though these techniques were difficult to apply to color
printing in such an environment. Today, skills learned in
the traditional darkroom are easily applied to digital
processing and printing of both color and monochrome
images. Because these digital tools are so much more
versatile and powerful than the traditional methods, I now
digitize earlier film captures for current processing and
printing.
In the 1990s I resumed a serious interest in nature and
landscape work, traveling often to the Eastern Sierra and
Owens Valley. The emptiness of those lands is alluring, and
their simple beauty is often ignored by those passing
through too quickly. In these photographs I sought to
capture the history suggested by the lone trees and old
irrigation byways. I wanted the images to have a surrealistic
edge, an emotional tug. Later, I carried this approach to
other areas in California, then to Hawaii, New York,
Kansas and other locales.
Today, though techniques and equipment have evolved, I
continue to strive for a visceral dimension in every image,
to convey the energy or serenity—or whatever—that lies
beneath the visual. I seek the charm and depth often
overlooked in our surroundings, be they majestic vistas,
roadside flora or simply the people we share our lives with.
Aside from digitizing earlier film images, all of my current
work is produced digitally using Canon professional
cameras and lenses. Images are captured in raw format,
converted to Adobe RGB (1998), and individually
processed before printing. Inks, papers and other materials
associated with the final print are all of archival quality.
