About me:

BACKGROUND:

I was born and raised in the Philadelphia area. First in the Overbrook Park section of the city and later in the suburbs where my family moved when I was in my mid-teens. Fortunately for me the row home we first lived in backed up to a 200 acre golf course where I was continually exploring the outdoors. It was here that I developed a love of nature that has stayed with me ever since. Most of my summers during this time were spent at the Jersey shore where I became infatuated with Atlantic City and all its kitsch and tackiness.

After graduating from high school, I enrolled in night school at Villanova University while operating a retail business in Philadelphia during the day. Two and a half years into this routine, I realized this wasn’t the path for me so I closed my business, left school, and decided to travel alone across the US in my purple AMC Gremlin. During this time, I developed my love for both photography and travelling. Enamored with all the sights I saw along my journeys I began to document them all - shooting mostly 35mm Ektachrome slides.

After three months of travel, I returned home with tons of images (and a bit of home sickness as well) and decided to pursue a degree in photography. I enrolled at Franconia College, a very small liberal arts school in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. It was here that I met my wife Lisa of 40 plus years. During the three years I was enrolled at Franconia, I took advantage of their outreach program and spent a semester living in a seedy apartment in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles while studying photography at Cal State Fullerton. While in LA I also enrolled in a photography lecture series sponsored by UCLA where I was exposed to the work of many of the great contemporary photographers of my time. At this point, I was exclusively shooting 35mm B&W film with my Nikon FM2 camera and I developed a photographic style that I later named “altered landscapes”.

After graduating from Franconia, I returned to working in retail. Lisa, and I and her dog Bado rented a cape cod in northwestern New Jersey. We lived there for a few years until Lisa finished her studies at Farleigh Dickenson. During their time in North Jersey, Lisa and I traveled whenever possible - visiting Florida, New Hampshire, and Cape Cod amongst other places. Once Lisa earned her BA in anthropology we moved to Pennsylvania where I enrolled at Tyler School of Art, working towards my MBA. After one year of enrollment, I left the school realizing it wasn’t the right fit for me.

After leaving Tyler, I opened a commercial photography studio in Philadelphia but shut it down after a couple of years. At this point, I took six months off so Lisa and I could build the home we currently live in; it was here we raised two wonderful young ladies, Samantha and Corrine, as well as a couple of awesome Golden retrievers. After the house was complete, I worked a few varied jobs over the next few years while continuing to raise a family, travel, and take photos.

Eventually I decided to get involved in the family business and I created SkinnyTies.com where I designed and sold skinny neckties via the internet. In it's prime, Skinnyties ties was supplying ties to The Bruno Mars Band, actors in the Lost TV show, as well as a couple other movies and Disney productions.  Our ties were also featured in Teen Vogue Magazine and Style Magazine.  It was also during this time that I became involved in the wedding photography business.

After being away from the fine art aspect of my photography for some time, I decided to return to my roots and rebuild my fine art portfolio. The Fine Art and Streetscapes galleries highlight selections of over 40 years of my work, incorporating both film and digital mediums and utilizing various format cameras.

THE TOOLS & THE PROCESS:

The majority of the Fine Art images were captured with 35 mm cameras. However, I also shot with a medium format camera and for a brief spell, an instamatic camera as well - this was part of a small format series I was working on at that time. The early color images were shot on Kodak Ektachrome positive slide film and then scanned; whereas, the B&W images are from scanned negatives. I started shooting on Kodak Tri-X and Plus-X films and then switched to Ilford HP4 and HP5 films as I found they gave me finer grained images with a better tonal range. The more recent images in the galleries are digital images shot with a Nikon D810 with either a 35mm lens or a 70-200mm lens. All digital images were shot in RAW format and then edited and converted to JPEGS. My first camera was a Minolta 35mm SLR with a 50mm lens. Then I transitioned to a Nikon FM2 body with a 35mm lens.  I have now transitioned to a Nikon Z5 mirrorless camera with a 35mm lens. I feel the 35mm lens allows me to capture a wider perspective which helps me better represent to the viewer exactly what I was seeing.