About me, and about my photography:

I am a retired Architect. During my Architectural career I was (and am currently) also into music and photography. I play brass (trumpet, cornet, flugelhorn and trombone) from classical and pop, to jazz. But, the emphasis of this site is on photography. As a student at the UofM I paid bills working as an Architectural and Wedding Photographer, but I am now concentrating on the five photographic categories listed in the navigation boxes.

Architectural Photograhy is a documentary art form with its own specific attributes, which are, of course, related to the architectural design process. An Architect designs a building by combining spaces into various forms, which are also contained within spaces, whether part of a landscape, cityscape, or the surrounding environment. The task of the Architectural Photographer is to photograph this space, and not necessarily the building in isolation. To photograph just the building is to produce a "snapshot" of the building's appearance. The important attribute of the building's design to capture in a photograph, and to explain the building fully, is the space in which the building exists. That is Architecture, and Architectural Photography captures that space.

The other aspect of Architectural Photography is the representation of the building's design as a true building within a true environment. In other words, the building and its environment must be represented photographically as "real". In the digital age of photography, it is very easy to over-saturate colours, over-sharpen the image, and over-process with HDR (High Dynamic Range) techniques of post processing. These are all great and necessary tools, but must be used with "taste" and moderation.

I became interested in photography as a teen in a small town in rural Saskatchewan. I borrowed my sister's Brownie Hawkeye camera to take pictures of my girl friend, and found that I had a natural gift of composition. My parents followed up with a small kit to develop film and contact prints. This further "developed" my curiousity enough to design and build my own enlarger, build a dark room in the basement, and then buy my first used 35mm camera. School year books, local weddings, and sports events, etc. became a constant source of photographic inspiration that carried through to University years at the UofS and the UofM. My interest in Architectural photography developed as a student of Architecture and in a photography course headed by Henry Kalen, a Winnipeg Photographer who became well known throughout Western Canada for his superb photography of award winning architectural projects. His work is still a standard by which others are judged.

I am an "available light" photographer. I do not use artificial lighting systems other than flash units that are compatible with the various cameras I have. I do not have a studio. I am not a portrait photographer, and I no longer photograph weddings or similar events. I have moved into the digital age for most of my work, but my favourite is still the 6x7 medium format Mamiya film camera. For photography as an art form, this camera just can't be beat.