Here's My Story:

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 I guess my passion for photography and subsequent journey began very early on, though I was much too young to realize it. I was born and raised in sunny Southern California, and my appreciation of nature was nurtured by my parents. We spent many weeks and weekends camping, backpacking and exploring the Sierra Nevada Range, with at first my father and then the Boy Scouts. 

Soon after acquiring a drivers license, it was off with my friends. We made it a habit of just meeting at my house on Friday nights, then spend the weekend climbing or backpacking.  We had met many wonderful people whilst in JT and quickly took up free climbing and mountaineering, then spent several years climbing with my partners Tony Eggnozzi, Thom Bradburn and Rick Bell. At around the same time that I became a legal driver, my father put me to work at the family business.

 

  The print shop was fascinating and I loved to go there with him when I was a kid, the smell of the fresh cut paper and various other lethal odors, you know ,fixer, ink, press wash, little did I know then, that I would spend the next three decades in that building learning lithography and subsequently Photoshop.

 

 After high school I went full-time at work and started feeding and then running a 38" Meilhe single color press, then later on the Heidelberg 4c Speedmaster. Soon after receiving my journeymanship, I made a transition that would change the rest of my life, "digital imaging."

 

 There was an opening in the color dept. (film) and I jumped at it, not because I was all that interested in color but the pay was better and there where more hours to be had. 

   After several years in the "Color" dept I made the next transition onto graveyard shift and into the scanning room. I started out on the HELL Dc-300 then moved over to the CP-341 and later running the Crossfield 626.  Just about the time I was finally able to throw a set of 4c negatives onto the light table and tell just from looking at the negatives, there was a color cast, it all changed. It took two years of scanning film for my eye to be able to see the subtle changes in light intensity through the negatives on a light table without having to use a densitometer.  Then two months later the company switched to digital imaging. Just my luck, right when I get the first thing in my life mastered it gets phased out. Out with the old and in with the new I guess.  

 

 There was a revolution coming and I was in the front seat watching it hit the windshield like a bug. Around 1992 my brother popped his head into the imaging room and ask, "hey, have you ever heard of MacIntosh, (at that time I was operating the 3M color worksation) No, I've never met him, I replied. He then went on this long winded explanation about how this gadget was going to change the world, and wow was he right. Several months later the company purchased a Quadra 950 and packed it with a whooping 256 megabytes of RAM and a one gigabyte hardrive for a grand total of $30,000.  I fell in love immediately, it was so much faster and easier to use than not just the workstation but any computer I had used up to that point, not to mention film, you guys who have never edited on film should consider yourselves lucky. The corrections we do in 5 minutes in photoshop used to take hours and several sheets of film to do back in the day.

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15 desktops, 6 laptops, two drum scanners and the rest is history, I've been a mac fan and evangelist ever since. 

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 Over the next twenty years through my family's business Color Service Inc. I've had the opportunity to work and process images from top photographers from all over the world including the likes of Galen Rowell whom I had run into while climbing in Yosemite Valley. Arte Wolfe, Bryan Peterson, Michael Frye, Michael Medford, Tom Till, and many , many others. I was scanning and processing some of the best photography and was absolutely clueless who these guys were, or the impact they would have on me later on in my life.

 

 It wasn't until 2012 that I decided instead of processing photos for others that maybe I should break down and purchase a "good" camera and start taking some pictures for myself. Coincidentally, later that week my nephew, who runs a photo business called and asked if I would be interested in a trade..... A brand new Canon T2i in the box for eight frames made in photoshop for the Santa Barbara Zoo photo booth. (Thanks, Ray)

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  I had been reading nothing but computer manuals and photoshop books over the last twenty years(not a single novel) so an instruction manual on how operate a camera was standard reading for me and I read it front to back, twice!!  I was hooked, I didn't even need to go take a picture, just it's functionality was intriguing, when you break it down to it's basics it was like a scanner that you hold to your face instead of having a crane lower it down into the building, the Crossfield scanner was longer than your average mini-van.  I spent the next year shooting everything, product shots, florals, cityscapes, urban decay. I even did the photomatix phase you know, super over done HDR, I still have PTSD from that app.  

 

I was all over the map and couldn't decide what I wanted to pursue until I saw a photo by Wayne Pinkston. Wow, so much detail in the foreground and drama he had worked into the image really spoke to me and I started to yearn once more for knowledge and for the wilderness.

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 It was later that year when I was listening to a podcast about landscape photography and the host made a comment something to the effect of  "photographing is only 30% of the picture, the other 70% is photoshop, "WHAT" I thought, that means I'm already ahead of the game, what a coincidence I thought, but still I hadn't realized the magnitude of that statement. After that, everything just seemed to fall into place, my experience in backpacking, climbing, mountaineering, mountain biking, photoshop, photography...... "GPS" was the final piece of the puzzle. Five years before I took up photography, I had been using Strava GPS to track all my mountain bike rides, so I was already familiar with how Google Earth functioned and even had a huge catalogue of riding trails, in fact Google Earth was my favorite application second only too Photoshop.

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  I decided to find out how Wayne and Royce his mentor where getting the incredible photos they were capturing........

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 Too be continued........