So Let Me Introduce to You...

Greetings from SteveR! 

It occured to me that I hadn't yet properly introduced myself, so here goes...

I grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland, but moved to Manhattan in the mid-70's. While I was living there, I met my wife, Sandy. I've been married to Sandy, a wonderful girl from the Anglophone side of Montréal, for almost 25 years. We have two great kids, Leah 22 and Ben 18. and have lived near Annapolis, Maryland since Ben was 3 months old. Last week, I turned 55 years old. So much for the stats.

A few weeks after I graduated from high school in 1967, my friend Roger showed me how to develop B&W film and prints. The very first time I saw one of my images start to emerge under the safelight, I was hooked.

My first camera was Dad's old German-made Kodak Retina I - a beautiful rangefinderless folding 35mm camera with a good Schneider lens. Roger gave me one of his Dad's old 1940's-style GE light meters, and I was on my way.

Within a year, I bought my first serious camera, a 1965 Nikon F, Photomic T. Around the time I moved to New York City, I switched to a couple of Olympus OM-1's and even had a Leica IIIf, an M-3, and a Minolta CL at one time. In short, I was an enthusiastic amateur all during the '70s, shooting B&W that I developed in my Manhattan kitchen and Kodak slide film.

All that somehow stopped in 1980 or '81, when marriage, first house, and raising a family gave me new priorities. I sold all my cameras, and photography for the next many years meant family photos using Sandy's Canon Sure-Shot (not that their's anything wrong with that!)

The spark came back to me in 2001, and now I'm back into photography stronger than ever. Although I re-started my born-again photographic life with some wonderful old metal-mechanical-manual cameras and film, since mid-2003 I've gone all digital.

Although we live on opposite coasts, Warren and I "met" each other through the "Commie Camera Forum," thanks to our mutual obsession... uhhh.... I mean, interest, in cameras from the Former Soviet Union.

Athough my job is as a database developer and I work with PCs all day every day, I'm still amazed at how PCs and the Internet have enabled people like us, with common interest, to come together - distance and location is no longer an issue!

I'd like to thank Warren for setting up this great forum for us to share and enjoy.

Best regards,
SteveR