From the time I purchased my first "real" camera in high school with the prize money from a National Geographic cartography competition, I have been an avid amateur photographer.  Photography for me has always been a way of exploring the world, whether by capturing the feeling of a mountain vista or revealing the tiny details of an insect's body.

While my longtime focus has been on landscape photography, the COVID-19 pandemic prompted me to find another way to explore the world closer to home with macrophotography, which quickly became an obsession.  I found my daily "safari" in the back yard to be the perfect escape from the stresses of work and life during the pandemic.  The practice of stilling my mind and focusing on a single plant or single patch of ground as I searched for interesting insects and spiders to photograph was therapeutic and opened a whole world that had always been right at my feet but had escaped my notice.

More recently,  I have been experimenting with mounting a microscope objective to my camera to capture intricately detailed photos of insects.  Using the microscope lens, only a minute portion of an insect's body is in focus.  To solve this problem, hundreds of individual photos are "stacked" together, each one capturing a different slice of the subject, to yield a single, fully focused image.

When not behind a lens, developing film, or editing photos, I am a health policy analyst, husband and father of three fantastic children living in Takoma Park, Maryland with my family and two dogs.