It has always been the actual act of photographing that has the greatest impact on me. Seeing and reacting to the wonder all around us. It is an immersive experience.
I was already working in my second proper job when I got my first camera in 1978. A friend at work was crazy about photography, and was convinced I had to get a camera. After that I used it a lot, even upgraded to a better camera and added more lenses. I traveled to lots of places, but my parents vacationed every year in the same place. My camera became the way I showed them where I had been, what I had seen.
The idea that there might be more started in 1999 when Jill and I put together a calendar using my photographs, and realized just how many would have been acceptable. Sadly, neither of my parents made it to the new millennium nor saw the calendar.
Ever since I came to the USA, I have been fortunate to travel frequently, and have taken every opportunity to visit local art museums, mostly to look at paintings by the Impressionists (and not just French, there have been many from America and elsewhere). In the last more than ten years I have extended my viewing to include first the Dutch Masters such as Vermeer, and then English greats such as Constable and Turner. More recently, after seeing “A Bigger Exhibition” in San Francisco, I have found much interest in the thinking as well as more recent painting of David Hockney.
In my web and printing work, I had been using Adobe Photoshop since 1994 but it was only in 2004 that I accepted that technology had advanced to where I might be able to satisfactorily work entirely digitally, to take a photograph and make a quality print, myself. By 2009 I seemed to be attaining some mastery and sold my first print.
2011, prints from 30 of my photographs were purchased by the new C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital and Von Voigtlander Women’s Hospital, part of the University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor.
2015, Ann Arbor District Library added 2 of my prints to their lending collection. They are both constantly out, and at least one always has a long waiting list! These sales came from the Michigan Artists exhibition I participated in December 2015 in Kerrytown Concert House (KCH) in Ann Arbor.
2016, I was invited to participate in an exhibition to mark the 30th anniversary of the Leslie Science and Nature Center in Ann Arbor. This was a lot of fun, giving the opportunity for many visits to explore the Black Pond Woods. The exhibition was again at KCH in December.
2017-2019, I put a lot of time and effort into Scotland, visiting many times. Two of my prints were shown in the members’ exhibition at An Tall Solais Gallery in Ullapool in 2017, and a number are now on sale in the associated shop Cabinet. One of my photographs was runner-up in a Scottish photography competition at the end of 2018 and was part of their touring exhibition in 2019.
2019 I had an exhibition of prints at the then Beaumont Hospital in Grosse Pointe, MI (now part of Corewell Health) as part of the Beaumont Arts for the Spirit Program, consisting of photographs from my many visits to the West Bloomfield Nature Reserve the previous few years.
Brief Bio
I grew up in Liverpool, England and have been living in the USA for over 30 years, first in California and now in Michigan. My working career has all been in the computer industry, small and large companies, internal IT departments and product development and marketing. Most recently I was developing websites, using WordPress, mostly for artists, with clients across the country as well as providing technical and marketing support to poetry chapbook publisher Alice Greene & Co.
I have enjoyed workshops with Lenny Eiger, Joe Cornish, Howard Bond, Brooks Jensen, David Ward, Eddie Ephraums, Adrian Hollister, Linda Lashford, Charlie Waite and Keron Psillas. I continue to study both alone and with friends such as Brian McBride.
I hope you enjoy viewing my photographs, as much as I did making them, and find something of interest amongst the portfolios and galleries. Many of them are available for purchase as prints.