About me
I caught the camera bug early on, when my parents gave me a Brownie Starlet camera as a gift for my seventh birthday. My father, an avid amateur photographer, taught me to develop and print my film in his basement darkroom. Though I continue to appreciate that foundational experience in black and white, I’ve given up the darkroom in favor of the more expansive creative freedom offered by digital photographic processes. As a photographer I’m mostly self-taught, but I’ve been fortunate over the years to get to know a series of generous mentors whose constructive criticism continues to change the way I look at things.
Photography is my spiritual discipline. My first published photographs were taken to illustrate my work as a newspaper reporter and freelance writer, but later, as I followed a career path that led to ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church, my intent has shifted from showing what happened to exploring what matters. I'm especially interested in the way light can be a metaphor for presence, and in particular in the way it breaks in and illuminates--light, like grace, changes everything.
My two primary interests now extend in directions that might appear contradictory. On the one hand, I like to photograph people in situ, not in the sense of making environmental portraits but rather to capture the varieties of human expression and gesture that make static images come alive. I like to watch the way people interact with each other and with the world around them, each encounter consciously or unconsciously reflecting the character of their connection to a greater whole. To me this is the essence of street photography.
Recently, however, I acquired a DJI Air2S drone and began to explore the world from above, an extension of the landscape photography that was one of my early interests. Shooting with a drone has been an experience of continuing surprise and wonder. Quite a few of the things I was sure would make interesting aerial images have turned out to be rather disappointing. On the other hand, I’m constantly finding unexpected visual treasures, so each time I send the drone up I try to shoot from as many different angles as I possibly can before the battery dies. Then when I’m back at my computer I sort through the results carefully, looking especially for views, patterns, and geographic relationships that can’t be seen from ground level. (I would never have imagined, just to cite a trivial example, how much of our world is textured by the blades of passing lawnmowers, at least in the area near my home in New Hope, PA.)
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