If you have nosed around this site you will have seen that some of my pictures are from 1949/1950. So, obviously I'm an old guy and started taking pictures a long time ago. But, in fact my photography "career " has been relatively short. I was a very avid photography buff in high school. I built my own darkroom and progressed through several cameras until I had the "ultimate" ­ a Speed Graphic. However, after high school, I stopped taking pictures and didn't seriously begin again until I retired to New Mexico in 1991.

I have never considered myself to be an artist but rather a careful technician. By training, I am an engineer (UCLA-55) and spent my career working in a variety of technical fields. I have included a paper of mine on Rules of Composition. If you take a look, you will probably conclude for yourself that I am truly a technician.

I am an amateur, but I tell people I am an advanced or serious amateur. In other words, I don't sell my pictures but I sure spend a lot of money taking them.

To date my photo interests have been principally traditional. I have my own darkroom and prefer the black and white medium - although I do color as well as B&W printing. I also produce a fair number of color transparencies so that I can compete in that media in our local camera club.

I owe a great deal to the experience of competing and having my pictures critiqued in a camera club (The Enchanted Lens Camera Club of Albuquerque). We have monthly competitions in prints and slides. The competitions are judged by professionals from outside the club, and their constructive criticisms provide a wonderful learning experience as well as some consternation. (You can view work of other club members at http://www.enchantedlens.org/camera.)

Even though I enter slides in competition, I don't consider a transparency to be a finished piece of work any more than a B&W negative is. The proof is only in a print. I believe that printing is and has always been the heart of photography (a la Ansel Adams). Most of my important decisions are in the darkroom. As a minimum my final prints have always been dodged, burned and cropped (recomposed). My camera decisions are made with darkroom manipulation in mind. Maybe most important, I truly enjoy the darkroom work.

There is a great deal of controversy in our club over the acceptability of digital prints. The belief is that computer manipulation is somehow cheating. I don't share that view. Computer manipulation is philosophically no different than darkroom manipulation. My experience using PhotoShop is that computer manipulation is every bit as challenging as darkroom manipulation. And the manipulations with the computer are generally limited to darkroom type actions. Lastly my computer products cannot compete with my darkroom work.

Even though my heart is still with traditional photography, I am spending more and more time and money trying to duplicate darkroom quality with the computer. So far I am not very close. I have constrained myself to the requirement to do the whole process myself and within my budget.

I have a Macintosh Blue G3, a 1950dpi 35mm scanner and an Epson Stylus Photo EX printer. The two major limitations I have encountered are (1) the availability of an affordable scanner for medium format film with enough resolution to print salon size prints, and (2) the inability to print in B&W without unwanted color casting (the unwanted coloration changes with different lighting and with aging). I am reasonably pleased with the digital color prints that I have produced from images scanned on higher resolution equipment.