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About Me

I live in Harrisburg Illinois and have my whole life. I’m currently 25 years old and employed as an art teacher. Along with art and photography I enjoy various activities such as bicycling, radio controlled cars, computers, computer games, aquariums, and mp3s.

I started taking pictures in 1997 with my Dad’s older Ricoh 35m SLR, I was actually very fortunate to have learned on this camera since it taught me valuable lessons about how photography actually works. That year during the summer that separated my last year of high school and my first year of college I took more photos and became interested in the processing of Black and White film so I started developing my own stuff in my parent’s bathroom. I took a basic photography class at Southeastern Illinois College and found that I had learned most of the stuff we learned, if not more, over the summer. When I transferred to Southern Illinois University, SIU, I never had time for another art class since photography was considered a separate program from the art program and I was required to take many mostly useless education classes.

Over the last few years I have done less and less photography. My interest was rekindled when I taught it to my high school art classes last semester. Since then my work is going in a different direction, I no longer slave for hours in faint red light to produce a few useable prints in black and white. I’ve switched to a digital camera and have started doing all my processing on the computer. While it is much less physical it is so much more efficient. I can go out somewhere and make my photographs, come home and stick my memory card in my computer. Load the images in Raw capture software to correct any mistakes that I may have made during shooting. Then load them into Photoshop and polish them off before publishing them on the web all in one night.

My future goals for photography are now pretty focused. I want to create the most definitive collection of Southern Illinois images possible and share them with whoever wants to see them.