I am an aspiring fine art photographer, located in New York's Hudson Valley. As you can tell from the photos, I have been taking photographs for a long time. I would say my first real photograph, with a Kodak Brownie camera, occurred when I was ten or eleven, about a decade before the first of the two self-portraits above.
In the meantime, I've worked as a religious professional and a computer programmer, retiring in 2010.
My initial motivation for taking pictures was to remember. I've often recognize that what I'm seeing at a particular time and place is unique, not something I can see every day or at will. Then I will use software (Photoshop CC, for example) to combine these moments--sometimes with "staged" images created for a particular concept--into a composition that has some meaning to me. Occasionally, the results are whimsical if not actually comical.