My fascination with photography began as a boy about 10 years old. I remember standing on the green in Lexington, Massachusetts, Brownie Reflex in hand, determined to make a great photograph of the statue of the Minute Man! I traveled across Asia, Australia and Europe with my parents, for schooling or with the military until I settled in for graduate school in geology in Texas. There I was required to do my own darkroom work with black-and-white photomicrographs. Rocks and minerals in thin-section are incredibly beautiful, with colors you cannot see with the naked eye, so the transformation of those brilliant hues into effective black-and-white images was my first introduction into the essential values of form and tone as surrogates for color. I was on my way.

Some few years later I was given a membership in the Sierra Club. The Club's marvelous "exhibit-format" series of books introduced me to the worlds of both Ansel Adams in black and white and geniuses such as Eliot Porter and Phillip Hyde in color. One year I visited Yosemite Valley and stumbled by chance on Best's Studio, where I was able to see Ansel Adams' original prints. I remember taking one in my hands and saying to myself, "This is the first time I ever saw a real photograph!"

By this time I was working virtually full-time in scientific photography, using all manner of microscopes to solve industrial materials problems. In the early years (for me that meant the 60's and 70's) almost all of this was done in black-and-white and I spent thousands of hours in the dark room making prints. As commitment to the Sierra Club's conservation goals grew, my understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of the work deepened and I wanted to bolster my own participation with more effective photography. I had a chance to take the famed Ansel Adams "Yosemite Workshop" in 1972, working directly there with Ansel and several other world class photographers. I joined Friends of Photography and took fine-print workshops with the likes of John Sexton. About this time I took the Grand Prize in the Carnegie's Museum's Natural World exhibit with a black-and-white print. The negative was made in Yosemite when Ansel was standing about 20 feet away! I felt indeed blessed by this personal association with "the Master", in more ways than one.

One of my most valued experiences was the conception and implementation of a photographic exchange with Donetsk, a city in Eastern Ukraine, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. When in Washington, DC, in 1984, it occurred to me that photography should be able to make a difference in the way the US and Soviet peoples saw each other. Our image abroad was largely controlled by such movies as Rambo and I felt we were so much better than that (we got better for a while there, but I'm sad to think we've recently lost most of the ground we gained in the interim). I traveled to Donetsk alone to meet the city's officials and set up the exchange. 39 Pittsburgh professional photographers joined me in developing a 65-print show, donating their work to tell a balanced, more humane story of Pittsburgh. We exhibited the show first at the PPG Winter Garden, then Gregory and Kathy Zaretsky took the show to Donetsk and hung it for us in the city's art museum. It traveled in Ukraine for a year, opening finally in Friendship House in Kiev in May, 1988. A Donetsk exhibit came to Pittsburgh in return and was shown around western PA for a year. This whole project was a great satisfaction to me.

"Mountain Light," Galen Rowell's superb book on high-country photography, was influential in my photographic life. He converted me to Olympus OM-4T equipment, in part because it was so light for backpacking, but also because of its superb quality. I rarely use auto exposure or flash, preferring instead to stick with manual adjustments and available light. But Galen taught me not to be afraid of "playing" with the exposures with filters and above all with the magic of timing, knowing what the sun was doing... or better, was going to do.

I am struggling, as many of us are, with the conversion to digital. One thing I must say for it: it has re-introduced an element of fun to the craft that has never been so easy to take advantage of. Instant gratification is so cheap now!! My equipment has not gotten lighter these days, because I now have so much more: an OM-4 system, a Russian Horizon panoramic camera, a Leica spotting scope and conversion accessories to use with a Nikon Coolpix 4500 for bird photography. This all weighs about 30 pounds, along with a heavy tripod to hold the telescope steady!

I printed almost all of the work in this show, either in the darkroom or on my Epson 2200 printer. All of the color work was either done with the Nikon or the Olympus. Most of the color is done with Ektachrome 200, scanned with an Epson 2400 transparency scanner, printed on the Epson 2200. My black and white work is almost all done with TriX film. In the dark room over the years I discovered that it took me about three hours to make one print that was acceptable. Having done that one, I might then be able to make more of the same in less time, but that first one was a struggle. I haven't got the timing down yet on digital printing, but it does take many more hours than you expect of sitting at the computer to get them the way you want them. And they still get printed one at a time, each image demanding different responses than the last.

I have taken awards in both "open" and scientific competitions and have had work published in many areas including Sierra Magazine (both black-and-white and color), the Christian Science Monitor, and even Popular Science. I have published a series of black-and-white posters of Pittsburgh (still available) and shown at the Three Rivers and Shadyside Festivals. Some of my recent interests have included black-and-white images of skies in northwestern British Columbia, made during a natural history expedition into the Great Bear Rain Forest, and color images of arrangements by my wife, Linda Bazan, of flowers we had grown at home. I use my collection of over 3000 slides to illustrate natural history lectures, many on the forests of Pennsylvania.

In the present show there are images from the French Alps, SE Utah, NW British Columbia, Penobscot Bay in Maine… and many from my back yard in Pittsburgh.