Why?

I can’t say I’m a blogger, but maybe I’ll add a few things here from time to time. Before everything is said and done I’ll probably do a lot more than is said, at least I hope.

As I say in my introduction page, I love photographs. I always have. Why is that I wonder? Where does the passion for anything we love come from? Is it hereditary? Not so much, I think. Neither of my parents were particularly passionate about anything that I can remember. My Dad was an excellent craftsman, but not in any particular field. So I can’t say it was handed down by parenting either. I did, as I said, watch Dad develop photographs in a makeshift darkroom when I was very young, perhaps age five, but that was not something that I grew up with. It only happened a very few times that I remember and could have been only once. Was that truly the influence that set my course? If so, why? What did it trigger?

My mother’s brother was somewhat of a hermit in the high country of Colorado, very near Ice Mountain in the image above and about 20 miles from where I now live. He fiddled around with a camera, taking scenes of his environment and friends, often using the fixed, wide-angle lens of his cheap camera to exaggerate the size of a fish, or the apples he picked. Always blurry, they were fun to look at, and to talk about! Later, when his long hair caught the eye of a nationally renowned portrait photographer who asked him to model for competition prints, the images that resulted were like nothing I had ever seen. Maybe that’s what set me off.

Whatever it was, I’m glad it did. More to come.