I can’t remember a time where I haven’t looked at the world around me and thought of how it would look in a photograph, or how I would want to present what I was seeing. As far back as elementary school, I remember having a Kodak Disc camera, and shooting everything I could, wanting to be able to share what I was seeing with my family and friends. It was also something I shared with my father, who encouraged this along with my love of horses.

In the beginning, often the pictures were just snapshots of friends and horses out at the barn where I spent most of my youth. I can recall many afternoons chasing after friends (and being chased by others) with the camera. As my enjoyment and talent grew, I moved on to 35mm film cameras, and where it became common to find film canisters in my pockets and littered over my room. Generally I would use color film, but I watched my father shoot in black and white, and had already developed a love for it. Before he passed, he had started to tinker with developing his own photos – something I was very interested in, but sadly it wasn’t to be.

It was as I was moved into high school, that I started to take photography even more seriously, moving from simple point-and-shoot cameras, to SLRs. The first was a Cannon F1, which I inherited from my father and was my main camera for years. I still have and treasure that camera, though now days it’s more of a keepsake. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to participate in three workshops with Jay Dusard. This wonderful man would come to our school for our annual Fine Arts festival and work with us for a solid week. He was the one who taught me how to develop black and white film and process my own photos.

As I went into college, photography stayed with me.  I took the few classes my college had available, and continued to try and capture what I was seeing on my own. While the camera and film canisters weren’t quite the same presence in my life after college, I didn’t stop looking at the world through a lens. Since returning to Cincinnati in 2006, I’ve picked the camera back up, though film has been replaced by memory cards. I’ve had the opportunity to study with Jim Brockman, and hope to start attending a few workshops and classes around the area as time permits.

Over the years, I’ve always just tried to take the images I want to express, sometimes it works, other times… well the nicest things I can say is, I tried. I don’t exactly follow the rules in photography: I tend to play – trying different ways to get what _I_ am seeing, and this isn’t something that always follows the ideals I’ve been taught in classes and in reading. It was the way my father would take photos, and the way he was able to take how he saw the world around him and produce images showing his view, and I’ve always wanted to do the same. Although I worry that maybe I’m not getting across the things I want to express – I believe I’m better at expressing myself with images than with words.

While currently I shoot mostly in digital and mainly in color, I still love the clean and timeless look of black and white. Often when I am shooting, I see the final image that way, not in color. An advantage with digital is that I’m able to change those color shots in to the black and white values that I see. One of the issues I’d had in the past was that I couldn’t tweak or play with images, since I couldn’t process or print color film. The ability to finally take those color shots, and tweak them like I’d always wanted, has allowed me to better enjoy working with color images.

For the longest time, I rarely showed my work to anyone other than close friends and family. On the rare occasions I did, the reactions were positive. Still it took until around 2008 for me to finally share the work I’ve done. Since then, I’ve begun entering a few shows and working towards exhibiting my work.  in 2009, I was given the opportunity to do the images for a couple of books, and look forward to doing so again in the near future.  I’ve also been accepted into the Hyde Park Art Show several times now, along with several other area exhibits and placed 2nd in the photography category at the 2014 Loveland Art Show.