I've been taking photographs since I was in college. No, I'm not going to tell you how many years ago that was! Suffice it to say that the first photographs I took were on film, in the days when computers took up whole rooms and were programmed with punch cards.

Photography is my avocation. I pay the bills by programming computers. Since digital photography is heavily dependent on computer skills, that works out very nicely indeed.

Despite my technical capabilities, I'm pretty conservative when it comes to manipulation of images. I try to stick to what would have been done in the darkroom back in the film days. In my opinion if you manipulate a digital image too much it stops being a photograph and becomes something else. Digital art, perhaps. That's all well and good, and some beautiful art is produced that way. It's just not for me.

I also enjoy cooking, hunting, fishing, kayaking/canoeing, hiking, and a good evening around the campfire.

I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and lived there until moving to rural Indiana in 1999.

I live with my wife and two daughters, a dog, a cat, a miniature horse, two goats, six ducks and thirteen chickens.