ABOUT MIKE & HOW I GOT HERE

My photography is about people.  I think people are the most interesting subjects in all the world.    

I am the kind of photographer who goes to the Pyramids and comes back with just a few shots of the pyramids themselves but many shots of the people I found there, like the photo of a young girl seated on a donkey shown in the upper left of this page.  She was at the Pyramids the day I was there.  The Pyramids will be there tomorrow but it is highly unlikely that this young girl will be there looking into my lens, trying to figure out what I was all about.  That's what I remember of the Pyramids.   That's what I like about photography.   

The best photo to me is a slice of life, a tiny fraction of a second that existed at a certain place and time, and which forever after is both a memory and a story, a small piece of history in the lives of the people who were there.  That's the kind of photography that really appeals to me.  I can find it walking down some strange street in a foreign land or in a wedding.   The appeal is the same to me in both of these situations

I look back at my photos and I wonder what has become of these people?  What is the girl on the donkey doing now? What about the father with his newborn son, the mother preparing her daughter for marriage, the young couple in love, the teenager about to graduate from high school, or the young girl gazing off to some children playing?  I was there for that moment in each of their lives and I have made it possible for them to revisit that moment whenever they choose.  That makes me feel good about what I do.  I like that.

And so now you know why I am a photographer.  

The history of Mike the photographer started way back in the late 1960's and early 1970's  in Philadelphia.   Photography was an area of study in college and I worked alongside a pro for several months as his assistant; shooting weddings, shooting products for catalogues, and helping out with anything that involved camera work.  I slowly acquired all of my own professional gear and was then hired as a wedding photographer by the same studio where I had worked as an assistant.   

I also spent a lot of time during that tumultuous era doing street photography; photographing people, events, and faces, on the streets of Philadelphia.    Photography was what I loved and it looked like a photo career was in my future.    

Then there was a day of devastation.  I returned home one night and found that my apartment had been burglarized.  My photo bags were gone, along with cameras, lenses, and lights.  I had no insurance coverage.  My studio job required that I provide my own photo gear so I was also out of work.  There was simply no way to quickly replace what was gone.  So I took other non-photo jobs and then drifted away from photography altogether.   I worked for many years as a park manager for the Idaho Department of Parks and Recreation.

At the start of the digital age, in the early 90's, I picked up a digital camera.  I was almost instantly back where I had left off and I loved the feeling of having a camera in my hand once again!  But now the darkroom was in the computer and you did not have to book darkroom "time" to process pictures.  There was now a digital darkroom.  I started back in the photography business in 1999, doing art shows, weddings, and portraits from time to tome.  Now I am a full time photographer once again and I do weddings, portraits, special projects, and commercial work.   

I find that photography is both the same as it always was and also very different.   Photography is still all about light, all about capturing the right moment, all about the expression on someone's face, all about color or the lack of it, all about using focus and composition to direct the eye of the viewer, and all about using a lens to tell a story.  None of that has changed.  But it has changed in many ways as well.  You can see "the shot" immediately and you don't have to pay .50 cents for film each time your press the shutter button.  Photos can now be shared worldwide and instantly.   About 15,000 visit my website each month.  That kind of sharing was not possible back in the film days.

When I am asked about my "style", I say it is a "blend of classic photography and photo-journalism" but that's just an attempt to put a label to it.  It is best that my pictures just speak for themselves and I stay away from labels.  

I do most of my work in Idaho and Washington but I can be persuaded to work about anywhere in the world.

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