About this site Photography I have been interested in photography since high school where I was the school photographer for two years, but while technically competent, I lacked creative vision. Dispirited by my limitations, I lost interest until documenting my travels, gave me the impetus to begin again. My renewed interest encompassed travel, landscape, and studio, but my do-it- yourself home darkroom with a home- made enlarger and the cost of film and materials was limiting. The advent of digital cameras and printing was a release, physically, economically, psychologically, and, I hope, creatively. Digital Art If digital cameras and printers had been a release, the advent of digital drawing and painting was liberating. I had always admired traditional visual artists’ ability to ignore the detail of photorealism or technical accuracy and still capture the essence of a subject. My digital art began as an experiment to see how much detail I could remove from an image while still retaining the essence of my subject. I am now experimenting with techniques to enhance the feeling or narrative of an image, and I feel that I am finally beginning to make progress. Travel Here you will find personal recollections created for the pleasure of revisiting my travel experiences and of creating a vehicle (this web site) to share them with anyone who may be interested. They are personal and are conditioned by previous experiences, by preferences, moods, attitudes, and biases. They are entirely subjective; not even my photographs can make any claim to objectivity because my subject matter and how I choose to portray it are equally personal. Not all the images are my own. When my own images are inadequate, I borrow shamelessly from my wife Sheila. You will not find suggestions of places to see or things to do, no recommendations, ratings, schedules, or tips and tricks. You will find only my attempts to share my pleasure in the exploration of people and places. Poetry I have difficulty referring to myself as a photographer, more so, referring to myself as an artist, and even more so, referring to myself as a poet, but I was finding it impossible to communicate some ideas and feelings through my photography, my attempts at digital art, or even my writing. What is presented here is my attempt to express some of those feelings in poetry. About me I enjoy both the experience of travel and recording some of that experience in photos and journals. I travel with my wife Sheila. We travel in a small campervan, often for months at a time, and we are still together. Sheila reads the guidebooks and chooses our itinerary, I follow her directions and reap the reward of discovery, unconditioned by expectations. Organizing these materials for my own use and review, I found that a web page format worked well, and having produced what was really a personal web page, I decided to share the materials with anyone who may be interested by publishing to a publicly accessible website. The events, places, and feelings are described as I experienced and recorded them in my daily journal, but much of the background material was added during production of the web site.