About Me
I spent the first 35 years of my life living in Wyoming, growing up in Casper and living in Laramie for 17 years. Since then, my wife Vivian and I have lived in Las Cruces, New Mexico while I attended graduate school there, Fruita, Colorado for one year, and here in Klamath Falls, Oregon since 1999. I had a very enjoyable career as a math professor at the Oregon Institute of Technology before retiring in June of 2018.
As a child and teenager I spent time camping with my family and fishing and backpacking with my father. I learned to rock climb while attending the University of Wyoming, and started backcountry skiing somewhat seriously in my late twenties. Climbing has gone by the wayside, but I continue to ski (in various forms) along with mountain biking, rowing and whitewater kayaking.
In my twenties and early thirties I often carried a camera along to document adventures with friends and Vivian. After a hiatus, around 2000 I bought a digital camera and began photographing again. In 2010 or so I bought a 4x5 view camera and did primarily black and white film photography for five or more years. That was followed by a period of primarily color photography, and now I am again focused almost entirely on black and white film photography.
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Equipment Used
An online search can find a medium format digital camera made by Hasselblad that sells for just under $33,000. I assure the reader that I could use such a camera to make a photograph every bit as bad as could be made with the most inexpensive point-and-shoot camera or low-cost cell phone! My point here is that it is not the camera that makes a photograph - it is the photographer.
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That said, there are always those that are interested in equipment, so I will appease them with a very brief description of some of my equipment. All of the color photographs shown were made with two Olympus micro 4/3 digital camera bodies purchased from Ebay, one for around $225 (an OM-D E-M5 Mark I or II, as I recall), one for around $800 (OM-D E-M1 Mark III). I DO have two nice zoom lenses for those cameras, a 12-100 (24-200 35mm equivalent) and a 50-200 (100-400 35mm equivalent). I leave one lens on each body, a practice that I find very efficient when photographing, and useful for preventing dust on sensors.
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About half of the black and white photographs shown were made with one or the other of the Olympus digital cameras, and the remainder were all made with either a 4x5 view camera or a 6x7 Mamiya medium format camera, both of which are film cameras. I have a selection of lenses for each of those cameras, and use a variety of black and white films. Regardless of whether I am photographing with a digital or film camera, I always use a sturdy tripod, of which I have a couple, a taller, larger one for photographing near the car, and a smaller, lighter one for hiking.