Hi, I’m Mike…seems like a good way to start.  Why photography – old style photography? 

In the 60’s my parents had a sub to Life magazine, each week I waited for the next issue to see what great photographs would be in it.  So grew my love of photography.  Growing up, it seemed there was always a camera around.  Nothing fancy, 126 Instamatics, early Polaroids, but it is all in the family albums – Mom was great about keeping it all together and most important she put labels with dates and times to help us recall those moments years later – Thanks Mom.

The progression from 35mm to medium format to large format has taken place in the last six years.  4×5 seemed so big at the time, and seems so small these days.  Currently I am working with a 7×11 camera (yeah that’s inches) and 8×10.  The 8×10 is a bit too square, but it works sometimes.  The 7×11 is like a mini-12×20 inch camera, a great ratio (not unlike 5×7, which I work in sometimes).

Printing these days is in platinum and palladium (actuall more palladium than patinum).  Why? Well I like the look of a plt/pld print.  The tonal range fits my way of seeing.  And I like the process of hand coating paper, then exposing under UV light.  Have done some Gum over palladium, which I like but do not have a lot of time to do right now.

More to come later…Thanks for stopping by.