I’ve been around the block a few times and have learned a lot about many different things this world has to offer. I’ve also been to a lot of different places in the world.
Seems the longer a person lives the more that person learns to differentiate between bullshit and stuff that’s worth knowing. Sounds easy enough. But there can be some inherent problems with this as you must also know what the source of the information is and how that source views such information.
You see, any two people (or more for that matter) can view the exact same object, place, person, situation or whatever and derive two very different and distinctly different opinions of that reality. To make matters worse, both would be correct. This involves quantum mechanics and the theory of “Objective Reality” – it doesn’t really exist. Here’s a bit more about that: Quantum Mechanics is fun stuff!
Enough of that for now as I’m slipping off topic but there are some interesting opinions about this.
So back to Mr. dull (me), I’m originally from the East Coast – like in Connecticut / Rhode Island / Massachusetts areas. Spent the early part of my life in Rhode Island and Massachusetts then relocated to Connecticut a bit later. I absolutely LOVE the ocean or any body of water for that matter, even though I came damn close to drowning when I was a kid. Maybe I did and came back in a parallel universe?
When I attended school, I became interested in Science and also in Art – kind of a weird situation but it worked for me. Sort of a Ying Yang type of a thing whereas the Science was pretty heavy duty shit and the art – well, it was just that art, music, photography, drawing, etc. Have to admit I pretty much sucked at drawing but photography and music – a whole different ballgame.
At one point in time, I wanted to become a doctor and took up medical studies. Destiny didn’t have that in the deck for me as a few things came up that prevented me from going that route so photography and music sort of took over. I’m pretty sure I really pissed off a few people (ummm… mom, dad, and a few others) by not going the Medical route but WTF – it’s my life not theirs.
I’ll let you know a bit about the photography thing but the music thing is off limits for a lot of reasons. Maybe in the future be some additional info on the music end.
I actual purchased my first camera while I was in college as a pre-med student. When I had spare time, I’d do some shoots for myself and for other people that saw my work and wanted me to produce similar things for them. A star was born!
So things kind of went in geometric progression in terms of success and the next thing I knew, I was running a full time commercial photography studio. Between the time I purchased that camera and opened the studio though a few gigs happened. One was at a newspaper where I spent a few years as a photojournalist shooting all sorts of crazy shit from old people partying to shootouts and other insane things involving politicians, actors and actresses and a lot of folks from the music world. In the process I stacked up a ton of awards for my work.
Got a bit tired of risking my life in too many instances so I thought I’d look for something a bit less dangerous. So happens a few months later a shooter died at a local ivy league college and they were looking to replace him. Apparently they wanted someone that had experience and knowledge of science and was well versed in creating imagery in difficult situations. Damn! I gave them a call and the next thing I knew I had a job offer for the “corporate photographer” position. Yeah, I took it and soon after working with some very cool designers was appointed director of photography for their annual report and research publications. For the time being it was a nice distraction from news photography where I constantly risked everything to document weird shit.
Needless to say, this job became a bit boring after a couple of years (winning major awards for my work really didn’t make a difference either). So, I decided it was time to cut the cord and free-fall into the business world as a professional corporate shooter.
This is when things started to get really interesting…