Skeletal trees and reed textures that flicker in early sunlight are often what grab my camera lens. Near my home in rural New England are meadows tangled in berry-filled vines where rugged stalks scatter seed from swollen pods; and slimy bogs whose soup is home to richly
colored insects, frogs and grasses; and hilltops with vistas and valleys with rivers that gush in spring and languidly puddle in midsummer. So these are my most frequent subjects. However, as a born New York City boy, my lens is hardly immune to other quirky sites. I just choose to photograph most often in my own back yard.
Retirement after more than thirty years of teaching and digital cameras have revived my early love of photography. The computer is now my darkroom. My lens is tutored by my early training in the arts (my degree from CMU is in architecture), a life-long love of music
from Bach to Coltrane, and years of asking my students to try to see the world through the eyes of artists from ancient times to now. As I focus in on a spot of weeds, I often find myself thinking of abstract expressionist works I have grown to love, and I have no doubt that Charles Rennie Macintosh may have walked woods similar to those near my home. And so, when my photos rise above calendar art, they are more likely to be about the musical rhythms of line, texture, and color than about ideas that can easily be turned to words.
Although my regimen includes daily hiking, I'm at my blissful happiest when something grabs my lens and convinces me to dally in a new-found field scouting angles on a forgotten row of old corn stalks or an oddly poised catalpa. So much for exercise!
colored insects, frogs and grasses; and hilltops with vistas and valleys with rivers that gush in spring and languidly puddle in midsummer. So these are my most frequent subjects. However, as a born New York City boy, my lens is hardly immune to other quirky sites. I just choose to photograph most often in my own back yard.
Retirement after more than thirty years of teaching and digital cameras have revived my early love of photography. The computer is now my darkroom. My lens is tutored by my early training in the arts (my degree from CMU is in architecture), a life-long love of music
from Bach to Coltrane, and years of asking my students to try to see the world through the eyes of artists from ancient times to now. As I focus in on a spot of weeds, I often find myself thinking of abstract expressionist works I have grown to love, and I have no doubt that Charles Rennie Macintosh may have walked woods similar to those near my home. And so, when my photos rise above calendar art, they are more likely to be about the musical rhythms of line, texture, and color than about ideas that can easily be turned to words.
Although my regimen includes daily hiking, I'm at my blissful happiest when something grabs my lens and convinces me to dally in a new-found field scouting angles on a forgotten row of old corn stalks or an oddly poised catalpa. So much for exercise!
