I believe I got my first camera around the time i got my first sketch books. And i was only twelve years old. Art comes to every child naturally, but in different forms. I was creative with technology, and technically artistic with everything i did. 

I do mean creative with everything!

It wasn’t until a much older age that i realized how creative I had been for my whole life!

In Kindergarten, I was the last one to hand in any paper that involved drawing something. When faced with P_N on a “fill-in-the-blank” page, I was the one drawing an accurate safetey pin. I thought these papers were so hard because it took so long to make my “C_T” look realistic! 

And when I went to work with my Dad on the weekends, I would take the little scraps of copper that i found on the floor and twist them into an army of men and horses. Then i would leave them behind at the workstations. Much later I found out how much fun people had discovering my art on Monday mornings! 

But when it came to my first photography class, I bombed!

eMy first photography class was in high school. And it was black and white, film photography. We would shoot and develop our own work inthe darkroom. There wasn’t much i enjoyed about the chemicals and the crowded, hot darkroom. I even threw up in there once, ending class. 

What is amazing in my memory about that class is that i saved a lot of my bad pictures. DO you know why? I saved them because i knew they were bad, really bad. And I wanted to understand why. 

I went on to take painting and portfolio prep, class, and then NOT go to art school because i didn’t want to be like the hippy pot smokers who were going there. No regrets for my reasons, and it was probably the best thing for me not to get idscouraged by al of the amazing artists who were there creating. 

I was different. I was analytical. I wanted to understand WHY my photography was so bad. I would look at thos pictures and disect them in my mind. Each time I saw them, my mind would go back to the moment of shooting and think through what was wrong to make my photography so horrible. 

It was 20 years later that I took another photography training program. This time it was different. Years of painting and drawing people had taught me about light and shadow. Years of drawing comic book art had made me aware of framing, transition, cropping, shapes and movement. 

This time I was ready!

This time, I could see the light, all i needed to do was to learn how to capture it, to move it, or move with it. Understanding the technology of a camera was like learning a new brush, on new paper. At first it did funny things for me, but soon it became an extension of my creative vision. 

As part of a creative career, I now understand that one of my creative strengths is understanding how light, color and texture, cropping, framing, and human experience all blend together to make art.

It occurred to me today, although this is the first time introducing myself this way,…

I’m an artist.