I’m a writer, photographer, and musician.
My first camera was a 10 cent, one-use tin film camera on a keychain.
Almost every negative was distorted and flared, but the prints looked like the images of my young-boy dreams, so I was happy. It taught me to shoot on either side of perfection – always looking for something I couldn’t see.
It was frustrating, but every few weeks when I picked up the prints, actually sometimes months, the images dropped me straight back into that hazy dream world. I eventually learned to hack the shutter with a paperclip so I could shoot multiple exposures. It was a richly layered and heady analog space for an eight year old kneecap shooter.
Almost twenty years later, and for two decades I shot large format 8×10 sheet film on a field camera made of oak, and with leather bellows that stretched four feet.
The mechanics of a fully manual Deardorff were so massive and laborious, each sheet drew me into meditative unconscious flow.
Sometimes I’d crawl out from under the cloth with only a vague wisp of what transpired. When it takes four hours to set up each plate and another four to wait for time to settle, you learn to sense light, and to give feel more weight than precise reality. I shot intuitively, rarely bracketing.
Today most of my gear is digital and a different world.
As a teen, I was a guitarist and singer songwriter, and eventually toured the bar circuit for a few fun years. I moved quickly though to entertainment management, and for almost two decades managed and promoted events at venues like Radio City Music Hall in NYC, Royal Albert Hall in London, plus giant 65,000 seat astrodomes, and all variety of venue in between. We sold over 50 million albums and 3 million concert tickets worldwide.
As a musician I stopped and started playing a few times over the years, but I now play almost every day at home and with friends. We all have studios and gear.
I have however, shot pretty constantly since I was about twelve.
a few of my favorites …
If you’d like to hear my music, here’s a video of an Art Event we hosted a few years ago.
A studio Jam Band I played in for fifteen years, the VooDoo Poodles, did the soundtrack.