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My interest in photography goes back many years, even into my childhood when my sister and I used to play with some old cameras my parents picked up at a yard sale. I don’t think we ever actually took many pictures with them, but the flash bulbs sure were fun. I suppose it was not until I was in college that my interest began to transform into a serious hobby. I bought my first SLR camera (a Canon EOS Rebel 2000) in 1999 or 2000 with money I had saved from Christmas and birthday gifts. At that time, I mostly experimented with black and white film, shooting anything that caught my attention. Influenced by a long-standing love for nature and the outdoors, I found my greatest enjoyment lay in landscape photography, although I dabbled a bit in other subjects as well.
I am almost entirely self-taught, meaning I never took any formal classes or workshops or even did any serious reading on the subject of photography. How-to books just move too slow for me, and - being in college for most those years - I never had time or money enough to take classes just for fun. Over time, I learned and improved my technique, slowly at first, but each and every year I looked back at my work with the satisfaction that it was somewhat better than anything from the year before.
I progressed from shooting almost exclusively black and white to experimenting with color negative film, and eventually settled on color slide film. I received my first digital camera, a Canon A40, as a gift when I finished my undergrad work in 2002, but continued to shoot slide film for most of my serious landscape work for a few more years. When I finished grad school in 2004, I received a Digital SLR as a graduation gift, and I have seldom put it down since.
Being an electrical engineer by profession, and having a natural gift for working with all things electronic, digital photography was no great leap for me. No leap at all, actually, but rather a natural evolution. The technical aspects of photography are equally as enjoyable to me as the artistic, and enjoy digital post processing nearly as much as I enjoy the lens work (in contrast, I never really enjoyed darkroom work very much - too much like washing dishes).
My passion for landscape photography continues to grow as I continue to learn and develop my skill. A large part of the draw for me has always been that sense of adventure in exploring new places in this beautiful creation. I hope you will enjoy my photographs as much as I enjoyed taking them.
-Sam Parker
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