Robert C. Stern

I began studying photography seriously in college. At Michigan State University in the late '60s & early '70s, I bought my first 'serious' camera - a Canon F1 - and learned how to develop and print black-&-white photographs. I enjoyed the time spent in the school's darkroom as much as anything I did at the university.

Once out of school, photography was too expensive and time-consuming to pursue seriously, and it gradually became a hobby to me and nothing more. Quite simply, I didn't have the means to build the darkroom I wanted, and having someone else process my photographs gave me neither the results nor the satisfaction I wanted. That is until the advent of digital photography. It was immediately obvious that this new technology would address my concerns about control and cost. Well, at least control anyway.

I bought my first digital camera - an Apple QuickTake - in 1994. With barely 300 kp (that's right - kilopixels), the results were pretty crude, but the potential was plain to see and as the technology has matured, better cameras and printers replaced the early ones, probably more frequently than really necessary. I currently use a Canon 400D camera, a MacPro computer with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop software and an Epson R2400 printer. The state-of-the-art is now good enough that it will take significant technical innovations (as opposed to incremental upgrades) to convince me to replace any of these components.

Compared to 'traditional' film-based photography, digital photography is a truly liberating technology. Both require significant set-up cost (for camera, lenses and the equipment necessary to view and print images - enlarger and development equipment vs computer and printer), but once that is removed from the equation, the cost of taking photographs digitally is essentially zero until you decide to commit an image to paper. The effect is to encourage a photographer to take lots of photographs, to take risky, marginal photographs, to experiment constantly. A lot of those experiments don't work, but some do and that makes the effort worthwhile.

The bursting of the 'dot-com' bubble and the support of my loving wife have given me the motivation and opportunity to pursue photography as a full-time vocation. I truly hope you find this imagery as exciting as I do.