About the owner/maintainer of this web site...

Hello and welcome to my web site. It's been online since 1996, believe it or not, and grown quite a bit since then, so there's quite a bit to explore.

I teach Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign at Lasell College in Newton, MA and previously taught similar subject matter in Multimedia and Web Development courses at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio.

I was born in Hemel Hempstead, England way back in 1961, though I also lived in Kingswear (Devon) and Rugby before coming to the states. My family moved to the U.S. while I was still young and I've lived in Detroit, Rochester, NY, Pittsburgh and now Boston.

My first passion was photography and in high school I may have spent almost as much time in the darkroom as the classroom. I still love classic, black & white photography and wet darkroom work even in this digital age. I continue to practice this art and expect it to survive long after color film photography is long gone.

I'm also a musician and have spent lots of time in the recording studio as a producer and recording engineer back in the days of analog recording. It was in the late 1990's when both sound recording and photography started to become digital arts, taking place inside a computer, that I started to combine these interests. One such combination was the short film (digital video) The Last Tree on Easter Island that I made in grad school — I not only made the visual part of this work but also wrote, performed and recorded the music for the sound track. (In retrospect I can see now that it was a bit much to accomplish in one semester but the result won the "Best Documentary" category at the Duquesne University Student Film Festival and was tremendously satisfying just to complete.)

It was the fusion of visual and audio arts that inspired me to get my Master's degree in Multimedia at Duquesne University and set me on a course toward teaching. Most of my current teaching is done in the digital domain — though I'm trying to convince the college to build a darkroom — and Photoshop is my primary tool. I am an Adobe Certified Expert in Photoshop and have recently written my own textbook for Photoshop, having been unable to find an existing book that was good enough.

Every June you'll find me at Grandfather Mountain in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina for the Grandfather Mountain Nature Photography Weekend, where I've been part of the organizing team since 2001. I co-judge the photo grapy contest at this event with my good friend Doug Brewer.

Another annual project of mine is the PDML Photo Annual, a collection of photography assembled from contributions from photographers from around the world to benefit the Global Health Initiative of Boston Children's Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. This book raises funds for medical treatment and training in developing nations around the world. It's a great cause and helps me keep up my design and page layout skills every year.

You can find out about the main purpose of this web site by clicking on one of the main links on the left - Photography, Multimedia or Writing, but the photography section is the most frequently updated.

One of my favorite pastimes is running, which you can investigate further on this web site. I'm webmaster of the Rochester Running Page, the number one runner's web site in Rochester, NY. Worth a look if you're athletically inclined.

You can find out about my music and download some MP3 files on my music page.

If you have any other questions, you can probably find out what you need to know by exploring this web site a bit. If that doesn't tell you enough, use the contact link at the bottom of this page to send me a message personally.

Thanks for coming here!

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