Photography is my art.

I love taking photos and trying to compose a nice scene to make a subject look interesting.

Most of my photography is of buildings and places but I like to take pictures of almost anything that I think really captures the look and feel of a person, place or thing.

I grew up doing photography as a hobby while in high school and went and took every available photography class at my local city college in a small Los Angeles suburb while still in high school.

During my classes over the years I learned all about composition, framing, f-stops, focal ranges, traditional photography processing with film and paper and I learned to develop and re-touch my photos with dodging and burning techniques long before Photoshop even existed.

I even built a dark room in my garage to continue to develop film and work on photos for years until digital cameras came out – which of course changed everything….
I went from using one or two rolls of film to get 12 to 24 photos to taking hundreds of photos weekly.

The thing I like best about digital photography is it costs nothing to take as many photos as I want, whereas back in the days of film it cost a lot for the chemicals and paper to develop my photos.  (Anyone remember going to Fotomat back in the day?)

Lets be realistic, not all photos are great but the more pictures you take the more chances you’ll have of one or two looking pretty good.

I’ve gone on several trips to Amsterdam Netherlands over the years and I really enjoy the old buildings and scenery out there so I started playing with some photos I had taken and I converted some pictures into black and white to see what they would look like.

Here’s a few that came out decent that I thought looked worthy of sharing.

(I took most all these photos on the canals or near Dam Square in Central Amsterdam.)