About

With a crabby friend on Great Barrier Island, New Zealand

Hello!   I am very excited at the chance to share my interests and activities with you through my new Website. 

My interest in photography goes back to my childhood, when my parents gave me a Kodak Brownie camera for Christmas, probably when I was eight or nine.  I bought my first “real” camera–an Olympus Pen D–during an excursion to the Orient with the Capital University Chapel Choir, and my first single-lens reflex camera (a Pentax Spotmatic) in Germany when I went there in April 1968 to study veterinary medicine at the Free University of Berlin.  My current cameras are a Nikon D-80 and a (waterproof) Pentax W-90.

I first picked up a guitar during my Freshman year at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, inspired by my roommate Rick Odgers, who was a member of a folk trio and played guitar and a long-neck Vega banjo.  I taught myself to play by listening to and emulating the talents of other guitarists, especially Paul Simon, Tom Paxton, Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey, Joni Mitchell, and Judy Collins, among others.  I wrote my first song during a break while working at a summer job at a greasy Ford Motor Co. factory.  I currently have three musical cohorts, who live in other parts of the country (we call our group Indian Summer), and we get together as often as we can (usually once a year).  We recorded an album (Aftermath) that we committed to a CD in 2003, and have been trying to make another, but things seem to keep getting in the way.  We’ll keep trying, though!