I first became seriously involved in photography as a young teenager in my home town of Silver Spring, Maryland. I was made Chief Photographer for my high school yearbook, and then went off to become one of God's Frozen People at Rochester Institute of Technology, where I majored in Professional Photography and Photographic Illustration and partied heroically for 4 years. Upon graduation, I moved to San Francisco and have lived here ever since. I toiled in the retail and wholesale record business for 10 years, before learning computer programming and getting a real job.

My first rock concert was April 27, 1969 at the Baltimore Civic Center with Frank Zappa and the Mothers, Country Joe and the Fish, Ten Years After, and the Buddy Miles Express. I tried taking some photos, but was much too far away and they came out badly. However, it made me realize what a thrilling, peak experience a live show provided to me, and I continued going to more and more gigs (and continue to do so; I still attend around 50 shows per year, mostly contemporary indie-rock type artists).

I kept going to shows and bringing my camera, and eventually came to the realization that if I got close enough to the stage, I could come up with some splendid images if I shot enough film. Through trial and error and intuition, I learned what to avoid and what to look for and how to work composition into what was going on on stage. I also learned how to hold a Nikon F with a 200mm lens as steady as possible while being in the midst of a heaving mass of humanity.

I printed my photos at the San Francisco Rec Department rental darkrooms, but did nothing with them but amuse myself and my friends. I saw many people taking pictures at shows and figured everybody's would look about the same. In the early 80's, artists and promoters stopped letting people bring cameras into shows without a photo pass, and while I still went to gigs, I left the camera behind for good.

Enter the computer age; a few years ago, I started seeing the few other websites displaying and selling concert photos taken around the same time as mine, and I thought that what I had was better than most of what I was seeing; 'hmmm', I thought. So I bought a Nikon film scanner and spent several months scanning my concert photos, both B&W negatives (about 95% of my work) and color slides. BIG JOB!! I then got an Epson R2400 printer (later replaced by a Stylus Pro 3800) and started cranking out prints, after removing dust and scratches and bringing out detail in Photoshop that I'd never seen before in darkroom printing.

I believe that there is a certain quality of vision and composition that runs throughout most of the images I have on My Pix Rock; my goal is for most of them to stand on their own as well-composed photographs with a somewhat thematic feel to them even to those unfamiliar with the musical artists involved. Enjoy them and have a good time...