I had been interested in photography for quite a while but was deterred from it initially by the need to memorize light exposure readings and camera settings, compounded by the need to wait days or weeks to see the finished product from the developer! I had neither the memory nor the patience to deal with all that!
Then came digital cameras, very poor to begin with but when the ascending quality met the descending price, I was on board! As a guitarist, my favorite thing is improvising, and digital cameras finally gave the user the freedom to do just that; to see in real time on the screen exactly what the image would look like while making adjustments on the fly. To continue my music analogy, making photographs with film was akin to playing a silent guitar solo and waiting a week to hear what you had done! With digital I was playing live!
The freedom to experiment with digital cameras was thrilling. Serendipitously, just about that time, a plague of Gypsy moths invaded our cottage in the Catskills and we had hundreds of them flying around our deck lighting. I noticed a flickering after-image as they circled around and thinking it might be caused by the 60 cycle ac power, I decided to take long exposures to try to figure it out. But instead of seeing multiple images in the one-second exposures, to my amazement I had captured the flowing beauty of the wingbeats of these tiny acrobats! I was immediately hooked on photography!
When the great master printer Sue Oehme invited me to go to Colorado to photograph some more and to make a series of solar plate etchings from my images I was thrilled!
I have continued making thousands of photographs of anything that interests me and am looking forward to returning to Colorado someday soon to make some more etchings of my work.
