This
page provides a brief introduction to my images and how they reflect my personality.
First, I'd like to mention that I work as a Project Engineer designing small ocean vessels, mechanisms, and other hardware for marine engineering applications. Consequently, I work for those select few that appreciate my style, skills and I do not aspire to be a professional photographer. Furthermore, my style is more of a fine art, esoteric/avante garde style that isn't geared towards the pallatability of mainstream. The images consistant with the mainstream fashion and art are only coincidental in that it falls in line with what I want to shoot. How I arrived at this path in my photography is briefly explained below.
My fine art background comes from oil painting people and my photography developed out of my interest in oil painting. The experience as an oil painter bleeds over into my photographer in that my approach to photography is that of an artist. I look at things as shapes, forms, light, dark, color, and shadows. I don't see couture or a model, I break down elements in order to achieve the result I want or what the client wants.
My experience as a mechanical engineer and my advanced degree in applied mathematics provide the project management, organizational, and problems solving skills needed to successfully create images.
In addition, I am a tacit person
and as with an artist, their personality is reflected in their work. My first
philosophical exposure to studying photography and mass media images was taking
a post modern literary class at Georgia Tech. I 
studied
two artist, which influenced me enough to seriously pursue photography - Cindy
Sherman and Barbara
Kruger. Cindy Sherman's "Film Stills" and for Barbara Kruger's
"Love for Sale" were the two most memorable pieces that influenced
me as a photographer. Both works of art required the viewer (reader) to look
at the images and think about what was going on in the image.
How does this relate to what I do as a photographer? Some of my images are fairly straight forward like my beauty and fine art images. Some of my images are tacit and require thought about what is going on in the image like my fashion editorials. For example, a lot of people like to point out mistakes in my image. My answer is: I am very careful about how I create an image and if it is in the image I did it on purpose and I did it on purpose to make the viewer think. The *mistake* can be something simple like cropping, camera angle, or image composition or as complex at illustrating an obscure idea. The importnat thing to realize about me as a photographer is that I know when to make art, when to break the rules, and when to shoot an image for the general public so it can be published in a magazine.
Lastly, when I was in kindergarten, my teacher saw me coloring outside the lines and told me to color inside them. According to my mother I told her this, "My grandmother is an artist and she doesn't color within the lines." Infuriated, the teacher called my mother, but my mother told the teacher my grandmother was an artist and doesn't color inside the lines. Furthermore, my mom replied that I was part of the next generation (x) of flower children.
The difference between now is I've
adapted to color inside 
the
lines when needed. Now that you know a little bit about me, I'll answer a
common question.
"How did you get started in photography ?"
I was in my late teen years when I inherited my first camera. My granddad and I were alone at the dinner table having one of our many discussions, but this one was about my art. Our conversation revolved around my grandmother who had given me some oil paints, brushes, canvases, and other oil painting supplies so I could begin oil painting. At the time, I was taking basic drawing and figure drawing classes. As we were discussing oil painting, he mentioned the utility of the camera for oil painters. In fact, my grandmother had used it numerous time to capture the landscapes that she later painted. With my continued interest in our conversation between the relationship of photography and oil painting, he left the dining room and reappeared with a wooden briefcase. He placed the case on the dining room table, opened it and showed me a briefcase full of camera equipment. As he removed each component from the briefcase, he explained how each operated. I later learned that the camera he gave to me was a Pentax Spotmatic with three lenses, which included a standard lens, wide angle, and portrait lens.
From that night onward, my journey began with photography. As with any young person, I photographed what held my interest, which was Hot Rods, Musclecars, and Corvettes. When I attended and participated in various car shows, I photographed car after car.
When
I moved away from home, I took my camera with me, but while in studying Mechanical
Engineering at Georgia Tech, I had very little time to learn about photography
or to oil paint. I continued to photograph and paint things that I found interesting,
but time for art was not available.
While I was two years into my Applied
Mathematics program at Florida Tech, I decided that I had not devoted enough
time 
to
photography and oil painting. I started to attend an informal oil painting
session at a local art guild where I would paint both the male and female
form - clothed and unclothed. At the time I was mainly interested in portraiture
(the face). I decided that creating oil painting would be easier if I could
photograph someone and paint from the photograph later. After my Pentax began
to malfunction, I bought an Mamiya medium format camera so I could create
clear enlargements for my oil paintings. Once I started using my Mamiya, I
never put my camera down.
My most recent self-portrait 3/2006