My photography is mostly about people.  Many thousands of people have been in front of my cameras and I still find people to be the most interesting subjects in all the world.  I am fascinated by the forever changing landscape of emotion that can be found on the human face.  I am the kind of photographer who goes to the Pyramids and comes back with just a few shots of the pyramids themselves but many shots of the people I found there, like the photo of a young girl seated on a donkey shown in the upper left of this page.  She was at the Pyramids the day I was there.  The Pyramids will be there tomorrow but it is highly unlikely that this young girl will be there looking into my lens and trying to figure out what I was all about at the same exact moment that my mind thought of her and how her existence must be drastically different from mine in some ways and almost identical in other ways.   

A photo is a slice of life, a tiny fraction of a second that existed at a certain place and time, and which forever after is a memory, a small piece of history in the lives of the people who were there.  I love to shoot weddings and portraits of all kinds because these things are about life. I think it's a noble profession to capture and preserve the important moments in a person's life.  And it's an honor to be selected to do it.  I am a photographer and not a videographer because it is this 'moment in time" aspect of photography that fascinates me.  My website says "Capturing the important moments of your life" because that's what I really strive to achieve. 

I look back at my photos and I wonder what has become of these people?  What is the girl on the donkey doing now? What about the father with his newborn son, the mother preparing her daughter for marriage, the young couple in love, the teenager about to graduate from high school, or the young girl gazing off to some children playing?  I was there for that moment in each of their lives and I have made it possible for them to revisit that moment whenever they choose.  That makes me feel good about what I do.  I like that.

Back in the Day......My introduction to professional photography took place in the late 1960's and early 1970's  in Philadelphia.   Photography was an area of study in college and I worked alongside a pro for several months as his assistant; shooting weddings, shooting products for catalogues, and helping out with anything that involved camera work.  I slowly acquired all of my own professional gear and was then hired as a wedding photographer by the same studio where I had worked as an assistant.   

I also spent a lot of time during that tumultuous era doing street photography; photographing people, events, and faces, on the streets of Philadelphia.    Photography was what I loved and it looked like a photo career was in my future.    

Then there was a day of devastation.  I returned home one night and found that my apartment had been burglarized.  My photo bags were gone, along with cameras, lenses, and lights.  I had no insurance coverage.  My studio job required that I provide my own photo gear so I was also out of work.  There was simply no way to quickly replace what was gone.  So I took other non-photo jobs and then drifted away from photography altogether.  

Then, at the start of the digital age, in the early 90's, I picked up a digital camera.  I was almost instantly back where I had left off and I loved the feeling of having a camera in my hand once again!  I started back in the photography business in 1999, although I called my business Camerabug Digital Photo for the first few years.    I now also operate under the names of Moscow-Pullman Photography, Idaho Digital Images, and I own numerous other internet domain names that direct visitors to www.digitalartsphotography.com, which is my main website.

I find that photography is both the same as it always was and also very different.   Photography is still all about light, all about capturing the right moment, all about color or the lack of it, all about using focus and composition to direct the eye of the viewer, and all about displaying something in a unique and exciting way.    None of that has changed.  In the final analysis the photographer is still far more important than the camera.

The darkroom has always been and still is an important part of serious photography.  The difference is that the darkroom is now a computer.  Any modern photographer needs to be as comfortable with imaging software and digital files as he or she might have been developing film and working with trays of chemicals in the darkroom.

When I am asked about my "style", I say it is a "blend of classic photography and photo-journalism" but that's just an attempt to put a label to it.  It is best that my pictures just speak for themselves and I stay away from labels.

I do most of my work in Idaho and Washington but I can be persuaded to work about anywhere in the world.

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