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Somewhere around 2006, while looking through a photo album that once belonged to my grandmother, I realized no one was filling photo albums for the family like the one I held in my hands. No one was recording the moments of our lives in photos. In a sense, our history was being lost. I was also at a place in life that as an adult, I could afford to travel and I wanted to be able to capture those moments and travels on film so that someone else could see them as I had growing up.

That interest led me into a local camera shop to buy a new Nikon body to replace the old Nikon EM my uncle had given to me more than a decade earlier. It was a Nikon FM2. I’d decided I was going to learn to capture images all over again and I wanted a manual film body to do it. If I liked it, I’d shoot a lot without spending much money. I was wrong. I think I helped make a photo lab’s rent during that holiday season between buying and developing film…At the least, I spent enough that I started thinking about moving to digital which, at the time, was still relatively new and far from cheap. But, soon enough, I found myself going digital. Over 100,000 images later, I’m still learning.

My parents had a strange assortment of cameras including a Poloroid OneStep, a Kodak Ektralite, a circa 1960’s Agfa 35mm Rangefinder, and a 1970s vintage Yashica 35mm SLR. I played with all of them every chance I got, probably destroying or wasting fifty or more dollars of film throughout my childhood. But when I was around 12-years-old, my uncle gave me a Nikon EM with a 50mm prime lens. It might have been an issue of timing but; somehow, THIS camera made sense to me and started a life-long interest in photography that lasts to this day.