When I was 12 years old, I started taking pictures with a Kodak Brownie camera using 127 film. I soon built a small darkroom in a closet, got an old enlarger and started taking photos and processing my own film and prints.

I took a long break from photography in my teen years and got interested in it again when I had kids. I bought a Minolta SRT101 and started shooting again.

This is a heavy camera with really good glass and it does an excellent job with great versatility.

After a few years I thought I would try my hand at medium format and purchased a Pentax 645. I started to get friendly with the local photo shop and purchased a 4x5 color enlarger - I never did color at home because of the cost of chemistry but soon started doing my on medium format developing and printing

After a while I abandoned 645 format for 6x6 format with a Rollei SL66 which I still have

The SL66 has bellows and some movements so you can compensate of parallel lines that are distorted from perspective. This concept lead me to 4x5 cameras and so I purchased a Tachihara 4x5 field camera. I tried many different 35mm cameras and many kinds of films and processing and was never satisfied with the look of the final prints - I walked away from 35mm for art photography. - I did purchase a Hassleblad 501CM though and it actually packs smaller and lighter than a 35mm camera.

When taking photos with the 4x5 and 8x10 cameras, it always draws a bit of a crowd - not helpful but interesting - folks are generally curious about such a strange way to capture an image. In all fairness though, if you want to catch junior doing something cute, it is really hard to beat a good digital SLR type camera. I did get into that for certain things but I keep circling back to medium and large format black and white film formats. I purchased an 8x10 Deardorf to make contact prints and they are spectacular. I love to use these negatives to do alternative process printing. So many examples of all these formats and styles in my gallery. I have not really scrubbed through them with explanations but in time ...

My last darkroom had to come down a few years ago when I moved to Wyoming - I will rebuild it before too much longer and resume my black and white efforts in a place were there are so many spectacular things to take pictures of. Here is my last darkroom. It had a 10 foot sink with computer controlled water temperature and a very long list of items to create whatever I wished.