Although Stan has been taking pictures since the early seventies, it wasn’t until the take-off of digital photography that he became passionate about the photographic process. It has been a slow, sometimes painful and certainly continuous learning process. But with retirement, it beat the heck out of playing golf. Like many of you, in the film days,he dabbled in the darkroom, however there just wasn’t time to become a photographer. Now that he has the time, Stan enjoys planning photo shoots, thinking about how to make an image and then processing it, and finally printing it. For him, the ultimate endpoint for a photograph is the print. However he still doesn’t consider himself completely knowledgeable about any of those steps; there is always something new to learn.

The biggest influence on Stan’s photography has been the natural world, especially marine reef ecology. He has been a certified scuba diver for forty five years and stopped logging dives after two thousand. For the past three decades he rarely dove without a camera and  seldom took images unless he was underwater. So he supported his habit by photographing and writing for dive magazines, dive shops and tourist boards. More recently however, maintaining and traveling with dive gear, underwater housings and strobes as well as cameras simply lost it’s glamour. So about five years ago he decided to explore the natural world on land. That meant learning about new habitats, and animal behaviors and photographing without flash. Not surprisingly, birds in flight caught his eye. They aren’t that different from fish on a reef! This has lead to studying capturing subjects in motion; more on that later.
Stan has mostly shot with Nikon, but truly has no preference, other than he is now trapped by the lenses he owns. It’s not the camera! Most of his post-processing initially was with Aperture and now Lightroom. He is Photoshop illiterate; another project in the making. However with photographing nature, processing takes a backseat to an image that allows the subject in its environment to be the art. Stan prints with a ten year old Epson Stylus Pro 3800, took a mat cutting course and watched Bob and Willa intently, but has now found it easier to order precut mats and recycle them as he mounts prints for exhibit.
The prints were chosen simply because they were images that he enjoyed taking, either because of the challenge or the memorable location. The underwater images were all published at one point but have never been printed before.