Do you sell your photographs?
No, and I don't have any plans to do so. I run a nicely successful magazine publishing business that keeps me busy enough. I've taken these photographs primarly as an expression of my art, for my own personal joy and recreation. While I do sometimes reprint an image for a friend, that's about as far as I want to go. I really don't want to turn this into a business.

Why the gray background?
First and foremost, this site was designed to showcase my photographs. The neutral gray is a background that nicely shows off all my images, without conflicting with their own color palette.

Were there any other design considerations?
I had originally considered putting the ZATZ bar across the top of these pages, but the bright yellow of the bar proved to be far too distracting. I also consistently reduced the size of the images shown to no more than 640 pixels wide or tall so that they'll fit on screens set at 800x600 resolution.

How come you don't frame your photos with white borders?
At home, each of my photographs is mounted in a black gallery frame, with a white or off-white matte. The framed pictures are mounted on a white wall. If you walk through my home, it looks great. But just because something looks great in the physical world doesn't mean the same treatment works on screen. I tried a variety of different presentation options and what you see is the one I liked the best.

Were these pictures taken with a digital camera?
No. In fact, nearly all the pictures I take are with a rather old Nikon, on color negative film. For many years, I'd send my photos out to Kodak to be processed and enlarged. Those photos are not in this online collection. Recently, however, I bought a film scanner and have been producing my final works by digitizing the images, working them in Photoshop, and printing them on an HP printer. The pictures shown in this collection have been taken over many years, but they've all been processed using a mix of old traditional film technology and newer digital technology. Some day, I may go back over my previous images and rework them. If so, you'll see them here.

Isn't it cheating if you digitally modify a photograph?
I'm asked this question regularly and it really reflects a misunderstanding of the photographer's art. You see, no photograph is unmodified. When I take a picture on film (or digitally), I'm capturing a representation of the light reflected from the surface of the objects I'm looking at. I'm not actually capturing the original image. And then, if you think about it, any time a photographer adjusts an f-stop to change focal length, or shutter speed to adjust the amount of light reaching the film, the image has been modified. Likewise, in the days before Photoshop, photographers would "dodge" and "burn" in the darkroom to enhance their images. In fact, just the choice of film (black and white vs. color is a vivid example) can impact the entire mood of the photograph.

Even the act of pressing the shutter release is a modification of reality. Most often, pictures are taken at a sixtieth of a second or faster (I often shoot at 1/250). We're talking about a fraction of a fraction of a second. I capture a slice of time that's so fleeting, it doesn't even last for a blink of an eye. Is that expression really what she was thinking? Want to make someone look serene? Snap the picture mid-blink, with eyes closed. Want to make someone look silly? Capture the picture in the middle of a sneeze.

Unless you're talking about photography used in photojournalism (and even that's not really "real"), photography is the expression of the photographer's vision, composition merely the canvas upon which he paints. The advent of digital darkroom tools like Photoshop simply expands the photographer's craft, like a new paint or clay would for artists of other mediums.

Are you or have you ever been a professional photographer?
Sadly, the photographic nomenclature isn't as broad as it should be. I'm not a professional photographer, in that I don't make my living taking photographs. However, I expect the respect and consideration of a professional photographer because my images are of professional quality. Personally, I prefer to describe myself as a photographic artist.