About Me

I got started in photography in the mid-late 1980s when I purchased a Minolta XG7 from a family member. It was manual focus, but had a built-in light meter with aperture priority so the camera did all the work. A 35-70mm zoom lens was on the camera. It was an off-brand lens, but I don’t recall the name. I later purchased a Vivitar flash, 80-200mm lens, and an auto-winder for it. I took a lot of pictures with that thing, and used it throughout high school photography classes, shooting a variety of color and B&W films.

In high school I started working at a shop called ProTech, Inc., in Alexandria, Virginia after school and on Saturdays (they weren’t open on Sundays). I mostly kept the stock up to date and helped out with miscellaneous odds-and-ends, but on Saturdays they let me work on the sales floor, where I helped photographers pick film, chemicals for home developing and printing, printing papers, etc. ProTech catered to the professional photographer in the area (Northern Virginia, Washington, DC, and even some in Maryland), so we had pretty much any kind of film that was available, including medium and large formats. Rentals were a big part of the business, renting high-end pro bodies like the Nikon F3 HP, motor drives, lenses from 15mm rectilinear, 16mm fisheye, etc., all the way up to the big-gun: the 600mm f/4 (I still remember the day someone rented it for a National Geographic shoot and dropped it — the giant Nikon UV filter on the end cracked in half, but luckily only the focus ring seemed to suffer any damage by being stiffened in the fall). We even rented Hasselblad and Mamiya medium format plus Sinar-Bron large format cameras and lenses, as well as studio strobes and even a full studio if you needed it. That store was great, and I learned a lot about photography from the people I worked with for those 2 great years. During that time I upgraded my Minolta XG7 to a Canon EOS 700 which had autofocus, and auto everything else, along with the manual controls I was used to.

After high school, my college courses didn’t mesh well with the ProTech hours, so I regretably gave notice and started a job that I kept for a bit, until I found another photography-related job: behind the sales counter at Ritz Camera Centers. Luckily I worked in one of the busier stores in Northern Virginia: Landmark Mall in Alexandria. Because of all I had learned about photography from working at ProTech as well as my high school photography classes, I had no problem finding what cameras people would benefit from and making sure that’s what they took home when they were ready. After about a year at Landmark Mall, I moved to Tysons Corner which was a big step up, since the top two stores in the district were Tysons and Fair Oaks, with Landmark right behind. I traded in my EOS 700 for an EOS Elan 7, which was a huge step up (at that time) from the EOS 700. I continued at the Tysons store until college graduation, where I moved to the Ritz Camera Centers headquarters, working in the advertising department for most of 10 years there.

Somewhere along that time, I gave up my Elan 7 for miscellaneous point-and-shoot cameras, which led eventually to a point-and-shoot digital. A couple years ago I left Ritz to work for a marketing company, and started working with someone who is an excellent wildlife and nature photographer. The spark apparently never left me completely, and in September of 2009 I picked up a Nikon D80 digital SLR and started re-learning photography. Though technology changed from the film days to digital, Like riding a bike, it didn’t take long to get up to speed. The biggest difference was “developing” my own photos at home on my Mac, rather than dropping off film at the photo store. I now have an assortment of great lenses that I am always looking to expand, as well as various software packages, filters, etc.  In November of 2009 I upgraded my Nikon D80 to a Nikon D300s which has some extra features that really make it a great camera for me!