Throughout my lifetime, photography and music have remained my passion. My attraction to un-amplified string music in the 1960's set me on a path of capturing various stringed-instruments and bluegrass artists that I admired, many of whom are now considered icons and legends. It was through my travels across America’s beautiful countryside and white-water canoeing along its waterways, that my port
folio took shape by my love of the great outdoors. From the West Coast to the East, from the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and the White Mountains of New Hampshire, I have maintained a strong proponent of traditional photography and “Silver” imagery and develop “gelatin silver” prints from film, in my own dark room. There is nothing more believable than a handmade, silver print, a thing of great beauty that captures a moment of time, allowing us to view a small fragment of the photographer’s “reality” at a given instant, frozen in metallic silver. A digital image may not convey that magical moment quite as well, because of the high level of manipulation that can be seamlessly applied to any image. I will incorporate the use of digital format but primarily for use as digital reproduction versus digital creation. I had the opportunity to study and acquire the skills necessary to master the “Zone System of Photography” under the instruction of Ansel Adams. The Zone System was a technique developed in the 1930's by Adams as a way to standardize proper exposures for black and white film, which represent the tones of an image from the darkest areas of your photograph to the brightest, whitest areas of the photo or print. Ansel perfected this vision through a process called visualization, which requires the photographer to “pre-visualize”, or imagine how the final photo will come out. Ansel has had an obvious impact on my work and technique and the development my own style, others that have influenced me are: Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Mark Power, Ross Chapple, and Woody Guthrie.
