Burlington Skyway, August 2010
Burlington Skyway, August 2010

I spent many years practicing the art of photography. Early in high school I learned how to use a 35mm Canon FTB and then develop the film in the school dark room. I finally bought my own Nikon FM2n and it still works to this day. Over the years I dabbled, shooting dozens of rolls of film each year. Eventually, I moved into medium format shooting a Mamiya RB67 pro and a Fuji GW670III. About 10 years ago, I got into digital photography heavily. I mean over the first 5 of those years I must have spent gazillions. I met a few like minded photographers and we started our own Studio on James St N. in Hamilton, Ontario. Our focus was to be a “go to” place for the regular monthly art crawl. During that time, we were a highly creative group and had a very successful gallery (See HERE for some of our shows). I even gave it a thought that I would like to pursue photography professionally, but eventually things change. I became restless shooting “standard imagery” and wanted to combine photography with different mediums like sculpture. When our landlord needed the space back and did not renew our lease, we had to close the studio after a 4 year run. We also knew we could not create the same magic and creative chemistry in another space. The vibe just did not happen outside the walls of that studio space, so we decided to end the formal group. We are however, great friends still.

With my passion for art crawl, artists and growing interest in performance art, I decided to rethink my artistic endeavours once again. In my honest opinion, the one thing an artist should do… is learn to accept change and keep moving forward. Try different things, use different techniques. Photography was a stepping stone for me and a great teacher of creativity, balance, structure and showing the world how things can have a different perspective, given a much different light or structure. I still shoot, but have severely lessened my need to upgrade my equipment and sold off most of my large studio gear. I even sold off the large DSLR kit in favour of a smaller mirrorless rangefinder camera with exchangeable lenses. During my new exploration I started mashing photography with Raspberry Pi computers, Arduinos and various sensors. This led to me to shooting pellets across my basement in an effort to photograph things at very high speeds and initiating an “Internet of Things” project.

This is some more of the other photographic work I have done over the years.