…your source for the creative side of Topeka

Truth be told, I really wanted to express my creativity through drawing and painting. I remember the
ads to “draw this” and send it in to see if you had the talent for an correspondence art class. I could
copy what someone else had drawn if given enough time, but my six year old grandson can draw
better now than I ever could or will.

After reviewing pictures of our first vacation through the Rocky Mountain states and the southwest I
discovered that I could express myself creatively through the medium of photography. I began to pour
through photography magazines and got my first 35mm camera.

Sometime around 1978 I purchased a book by Freeman Patterson, Photography for the Joy of It. I
later added his other books to my collection: Photography and the Art of Seeing and Photography of
Natural Things and over 25 years later these three taken together comprise my photography bible. I
learned from his books how to “make pictures” not just “take” pictures. In that first book he wrote, “You
become involved with what you’re photographing, and because you’re involved, you think a lot about
what you’re doing. You want to express the subject and your feelings about it accurately. So you care
about your workmanship. Caring and joy go together. In photography as in anything else, you’ll seldom
find one without the other.”

Patterson taught me to simplify, to look closely, to see things in a different way (what he calls “thinking
sideways”). And so, included among the pictures I’ve made are a picture of salt patterns on the garage
floor left after melted snow evaporated, and pictures of patterns in pond ice.

The first thing for me is to make pictures that I like. Sometimes that desire gets in the way of making
pictures that are possibly more marketable. Sure, it’s always nice when someone likes a picture