About

I’m actually “into” quite a few things. I enjoy just about anything to do with the great outdoors. But without a doubt, my main interest is photography. I’ve been into photography since my early teens, starting off with 110’s and eventually getting into 35mm. But in the late 90’s digital photography was starting to take off so I purchased my first digital and that really sparked my interests. By 2000, I was totally hooked and I sold all of my film cameras and started shooting completely digital. It was around that time that I took a photo class sponsored by a local photographer to improve my photography. I told him I had started shooting digital and was told that I should get another 35mm camera because digital was just a passing thing. Famous last words huh?

All this time I continued to mess around with my photos on the software that came with my cameras, but these programs were rather limited. I really enjoyed all the control I had over my shots and I knew Photoshop was what the pros used, but I couldn’t justify purchasing that program because a full version of Photoshop was around seven hundred dollars ($700) at that time. Fortunately for me, I did find a brand-new, unregistered copy of Photoshop 6.0 on Ebay (in my price range) and I was hooked. Of course it was very overwhelming at first, but I stuck with it. These days people actually come to me for advice and tips.

Since that time I’ve constantly kept upgrading to newer versions of Photoshop. When Adobe Lightroom was released I immediately picked up a copy of that to help me stay current. These days I'm a subscriber to the Adobe Creative Cloud which includes full versions of Photoshop and Lightroom. Some of my favorite tools are the Nik Software collection for my photo editing and Photomatix Pro and HDR Effex Pro 2 for my HDR shots. For about a year I was shooting Real Estate Photography and was utilizing a plug-in called Lightroom Enfuse for that.  LR Enfuse is also great for realistic HDR photography as well.

To keep my skills current, I have been a long time member of NAPP (National Association of Photoshop Professionals) which recently merged with Kelby Training to form Kelbyone, which I would highly recommend to  anyone who shoots and wants to improve their skill level in Photoshop, Lightroom or Photography in general. Like I always say, keep shooting and have some fun!