Why do I love photography? Put simply, because it incorporates and provides a healthy outlet for some important aspects of my life.

• I like making people happy
• I am a hopeless romantic
• I love adventure
• I enjoy, respect and appreciate nature
• I like analyzing situations and coming up with ideas and solutions
• I enjoy creating things
• I am very technically minded
• I have an insane propensity for tweaking and optimizing things

So it could be said that photography is something I love to do, and photography is something I do about things I love.

Sometimes I used to feel somewhat guilty about having had a relatively happy childhood – I have since over time learned guilt is nothing but a tool used by snotty people to try and control others …

My parents were well off and did their best to provide me with a loving nurturing environment to grow in, and to impart into me the true value of honesty, sincerity and personal integrity. They were also supportive of my basic good traits rather than trying to turn me into something more to their personal likeness and liking.

My father, a natural business man, was into photography as a social networking tool, which proved a very useful connection maker for his business as well as a great way of making people smile. But too often he would make my three sisters and me pose here or there for a photo and it used to annoy me to no end, so I developed an early dislike for photography.

Unlike him I’m not business-minded at all, rather I’m the techie type, almost to a fault if you could ask him. But he respected this and always supported it.

While I was in my early teens I took water color painting lessons from a well known Spanish artist named Guillermo Sureda. I pursued it for only a year or so but it got me primed on using light, texture and composition as a creative outlet.

It wasn’t until I caved in to peer pressure to get a camera and record group activities for a mediation group I had joined in my early twenties (after taking a sheen to eastern philosophies during my flower childhood in college) that it dawned on me how much I would love photography.

An Olympus rangefinder soon became a Konica SLR with an 80-200mm zoom lens, as my father jumped at the opportunity to finally find some topic we could actually bond with, and was happy to expand my equipment.

But the bonding pretty much remained at the technical and equipment level, as I was much more into nature and abstract subjects rather than social ones. As veritable proof of this, when I came back from a trip to meet the family of my wife-to-be, I had not one photo of them but had many images of a great tree trunk in their backyard, not to mention a beautiful Canadian sunset. Those sunset images showed an amazing improvement between my previous Olympus SLR system and my new Contax system with its Zeiss lenses.

As well as instigating my first camera, the meditation group also facilitated travel to distant countries as it fulfilled its mission to promote world peace. This brought many photographic opportunities I would not have experienced otherwise. I might add here also that my appellative DJ stems from Dhananjaya, the Sanskrit name given me by my meditation teacher meaning “victorious over wealth”, as in not influenced by riches.

Soon I was setting up a color darkroom – I never did any B&W (OK, once as a sort of favor to a dear friend, and it was much later on). Dip-and-dunk processing gave way to tube processing and eventually a Jobo automatic processor. 35mm gave way to medium format systems in various flavors.

I read up on the more obvious masters such as Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Ernest Haas and Wynn Bullock for inspiration and direction on the more occult aspects like visualization and composition. I also consulted relevant parts of the Kodak Library for technical insights. But it was Minor White’s seminal work on the Zone System that made much of the mystery of exposure make sense, and my quest for expressive images both more relaxed and intense, if such a thing can be.

My inclination to learn things on my own without help, sometimes in rather impractical ways, probably both helped and hindered. Museums made me impatient because I’d rather be doing something, no doubt to my loss. But the act of discovering and capturing some inspiring scene sculpted out of light has always fulfilled some inner need within me, its synthesis of my technical and romantic inclinations no doubt playing a major role.

More recently, several workshops with Alain and Natalie Briot have provided me with great insights into what I do, how I do and why I do, not to mention the great photo opportunities. These musings are in fact part of those results.

I also discovered after a while that where most people tend to think and visualize with initial specific examples, my mind tended toward abstract visualizations to which I would then have to give more specific symbolic interpretation. This has proven to be a mixed blessing. While it greatly facilitates “thinking out of the box”, it also makes communication awkward until I have brought my musings down to a more earthly interpretation, which takes some time and doesn’t always happen.

On another side of my life, I was always into inventions, science and technology. At the age of three I stuck a fork in the outlet, melting a tine and who knows what parts of my brain. At the age of seven I came up with an arc welder by cutting up an electrical extension cord and tying one wire to a pair of pliers holding the electrode and the other to the piece of metal I had decided needed welding. It made a nice blue arc before the fuse blew.

The cover of Popular Electronics showing a computer flip-flop circuit board initiated my eventual career as a system and software architect and developer, work that I love doing as it can incorporate many of those things that motivate my breathing.

When photography turned digital, it became an even larger part of me. I could now use a significant part of my life activities to help and implement another. Because digital technology made taking pictures much quicker and convenient, I soon saw the need for restraint and learned to back off and take less. I tried to constrain my shooting by posing the question “would I possibly want this hanging in my living room for any particular reason?”

This made my life much easier on the one hand, and increased my visualization skills on the other. And like I did in my software related work after studying and understanding some principle, I would integrate it into my intuitive behavior so it would come about without me necessarily being aware of it. And like so many other good things, it has its shortcomings - it's hard to sound professional while saying "well, it 'feels' like the right thing to do ..." or "my intuition tells me to do this ..."

Frankly, I have no clever or sophisticated method of deciding what I photograph. I don’t for the most part premeditate shots, and when I do it is usually in a very generic way, like “I’d like to get some foliage shots”. Nor do I run around with a camera always in hand, so as never to miss a magic photo-op, not anymore at least - I have found I can actually enjoy the magic moment even more if I don’t find myself fumbling with a camera in order to catch it. It’s usually during a planned photo trip maybe once and occasionally twice a year in which case somebody else is doing the strategic planning, or a local photo excursion to a nearby nature preserve, and basically consists of “Oooh! Pretty!” – fumble-fumble-fumble-click.

Of course there’s something behind that “Oooh! Pretty!” moment of apparent enlightenment, and the fumble-fumble-fumble-click action of image capture. The accumulation of determining influences, whether from natural tendencies, life experiences or reading, all combine to point out the beautiful and the unusual, and at times the unusually beautiful. And many years of studying and playing with all kinds of technical toys and processes have combined into some image capture skills.

All of this I have strived to let happen intuitively, as a natural extension of my living much like breathing. But by intuitively I do not mean unconsciously, but rather naturally and effortlessly as an extension of my self of which I am aware in an unselfconscious way, if that makes any sense. That applies to the breathing too – too long did I take such a marvelous thing for granted.

Although I really enjoy taking candids of people in their many moods and situations, a part of me feels like a rude intruder when I snap their picture, so I do not pursue it often and gravitate towards nature and landscapes.

Because of my usual choice of subject, I tend to shoot with a very small lens aperture - the current norm being ƒ/19 - sacrificing some sharpness to the diffraction-limiting laws in order to gain depth of field. This tends to instigate slow shutter speeds, so a healthy tripod and ball-head is an essential part of my camera setup.

I get very paranoid about dust settling on the camera sensor, so I tend to change lenses as least as possible given the circumstances. This is helped by the fact I use zoom lenses for the most part which also minimizes any cropping I may have to do later, a phobia for which I have developed and need to work on losing.

The captured moments are saved in a raw image file. This means the file needs to be processed in order to have the actual end-product image. During this post-processing phase I try to bring out the image I felt and was moved by at the time.

This also means I’m possibly forming the image I wanted it to be. I have no qualms about removing unwanted artifacts like people, vehicles or garbage in general from the recorded image if they don’t really belong (unless of course they were part of what I was trying to capture – extraneous objects can often be quite beautiful or otherwise meaningful). I will also fix not only the usual dust spots but image capture defects, such as blown out highlights which were too bright for the camera sensor to handle properly, in order to make the image look as it should have been.

The look and feel of the static image needs to emulate the mysterious and complex process of seeing, an almost impossible task given our eyes are both physically and psychologically constantly interpreting and adapting to the shifting qualities of the scene under observation. Add the fact that you’re trying to convey a full sensory experience with the aid of a single sense organ, and you begin to get the picture if I may so say.

I predominantly use general image parameters like exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation and the overall tone curve in order to accomplish this. I may also use local image adjustments to compensate for the lack of dynamic adaptability that our eyes would have experienced in the live scene.

I will never add objects that were not originally there, like extra sheep to the hillside or a non-existing moon to the sky. If by chance I happen to be doing a collage of separate images it will be obvious and stated.

Ironically, hermit that I tend to be, in the end you can say that the image is shaped by what I want you to feel about a moment I once had, a moment I want to share as a fellow human companion in this often sad and frustrating, but hopefully and ultimately fulfilling and enlightening trip through Life, for the chance that it will bring you some joy.

Over the years I've used many different top rated 35mm and medium format equipment from Olympus, Contax, Bronica and Fuji so I only have myself to blame for deficiencies.

I currently use (since Dec 2007) a Canon EOS 1DsIII 21 mega-pixel camera body with a 1DsII 17 mega-pixel body as backup. The 1DsII was my primary body from Dec 2004 until then.

My lenses are Zeiss Contax N lenses which have been miraculously converted to the Canon EOS mount by Bo Ming of Conurus in Vancouver, Canada. These include:

• 17-35mm ƒ/2.8 Zoom
• 24-85mm ƒ/3.5-4.5 Zoom (used 70-80% of the time)
• 70-300mm ƒ/4-5.6 Zoom
• 100mm ƒ/2.8 Macro

Since I shoot at slow speeds most of the time a tripod is a necessity. I'm now using a Gitzo G1257LVL Leveling Mountaineer 6X carbon fiber tripod matched to a Gitzo 2780QR ball head.

The photos in the web site will tell you what equipment and whenever available what exposure were used taking it.