I never had a camera of any type growing up and neither did my parents so for the longest time I was oblivious to what I was missing. It wasn’t until the late 70’s, my early twenties when I was in college that I was first bitten by the bug. I had a couple of friends that shot black and whites and proudly displayed the pictures on the walls of their dorm rooms. How cool was this I thought and I distinctly remember a picture of a waterfall that really peaked my interest. Still, it would be a few years before I would purchase a camera of my own. Money earned back then was for college.

It was the birth of my daughter that pushed me to buy my first 35mm. We had one of those instamatic things, you know, the ones that spit the picture out the front, you wait for it to develop and then have to coat it with special solution. I needed better pictures then that for my daughter so I rationalized the need for a Nikon FG with a 50mm f1.8 lens and flash. I later splurged on a Vivitar 28-90mm series 1 and became a baby picture taking machine.  I loved it!

Years later I began to focus my attention on birds, flowers and landscapes. Then it happened. I was taking pictures of Sand Hill Cranes in the University of Wisconsin Arboretum when one of them took flight. Without time to adjust my camera settings I panned with the bird and fired off 4 or 5 shots in succession. At first I was disappointed that the slow shutter speed I was using would result in completely blurred images but on the third shot while looking through the viewfinder I realized that this was serendipitous. By panning in the direction of flight the birds head, feet and body would stay mostly in focus and the stationary background would have a significant amount of motion blur. If I was lucky, really lucky, the wings which were moving out away from the image plane and independently of the birds forward path would show a sweeping motion. I packed my gear, dropped the roll of Velvia slide film off at the local shop and asked for a one day return. I got what I had hoped for and was forever hooked!