I love what I do, and what I do is make art for my clients. Photography, like any art form, can be beautiful, provocative, and serve a practical purpose as well. I am a full time professional photographer, with several hundred weddings to my credit, as well as a college professor, and have been working as an artist and photographer in the Cleveland area since 1988. I have a BFA in photography from The Cleveland Institute of Art, where I also studied painting, printmaking, and video. I continue to make and exhibit my original art work in various galleries to this day. Although I come from a family of professional and amateur photographers, art of the drawing and painting variety was my first interest. It wasn’t until I attended the Cleveland Institute of Art that I developed an interest in the camera as a byproduct of the video work I was doing at the time. Already having a familiarity with the darkroom process from spending time as a child in my brother’s darkroom, it was a relatively easy transition to creating images with the camera and realizing those images under the glow of the amber light in the lab. While most of the work I do today is digital in origin, the creative process–from composing images, making technical choices about focal lengths and exposures, to digital post processing–is essentially the same. The traditional process is not completely gone, however, as I still maintain one of the last professional B&W darkrooms in the Cleveland area, where I process and print my own work, as well as the work of other professionals and hobbyists.