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.
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.
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.