I love taking pictures of flowers & nature, musicians & performers, and (extra)ordinary people. Most of my nature photographs are taken around my yard, pond, and the nearby St. Joseph River in South Bend, Indiana, or while kayaking in the many small lakes and channels east of Syracuse, Indiana.

By day I am a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame. I am married to Gayle, an accomplished artist, whose advice and artistic insights are reflected in my work.

My interest in photography began a few years ago with a point-and-shoot digital camera that has a swivel screen. That screen freed me up to compose pictures in new and different ways. I learned how to "move" the background behind the foreground by repositioning the camera. To my pleasant surprise I found that composing in this way was also possible with a “real” camera, though at times this puts me in pretty awkward positions!

Images are captured with a Canon EOS 350D using Canon's EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens or Canon’s EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.7 USM wide-angle lens. High resolution camera raw image files are converted to Adobe Digital Negative files. I use Expression Media, a state-of-the-art digital asset management system to rate, annotate, organize, and convert images.

Images are minimally processed during my standard workflow. I use the Adobe Camera Raw processor in Photoshop CS3 to adjust exposure and white balance. Because I prefer to not use flash lighting, I shoot indoors at high ISOs creating digital noise which is removed with PictureCode's Noise Ninja.

I never print my own images, but instead rely on a professional printer, Lighthouse Imaging in Mishawaka, Indiana. Images are printed by a Noritsu printer on Fujicolor Crystal Archive paper after basic processing such as exposure adjustment, cropping and sharpening.

This website is created with RapidWeaver, a website design suite that manages the file system, allowing me to focus on design and content. Rapidweaver recently added Flash slideshow functionality which I use to display photographic collections. Flash is becoming the preferred way to present audio, visual and textual material on the Web because it allows end-users (viewers) to have some control over their "experience" while browsing the website.