About

“God gave me photography so that I could pray with my eyes.” Jones, Dewitt

My wife and I currently live in Raleigh, North Carolina near some of our children and grandchildren. I have now retired from medicine after forty years in cardiology. After retiring, my wife and I lived and worked in Peru as unpaid volunteer physicians until we were required to evacuate the country due to the Covid-19 epidemic.

When I was young, my brothers and I often hiked and backpacked in the American West where we lived. I carried a camera although I knew nothing about composition or lighting. For many years during my medical training and in the early years of practice, I did not photograph. In the 1990s, I decided that I needed some diversion from medicine. After a brief trip to Europe, I decided to begin photographing again and I purchased a new camera. I recognized that I knew little about how to make good images, so I began to read books from respected nature and travel photographers. I studied photographs published in the National Geographic to learn what constituted a good image. I then took a few courses to learn Photoshop and how to make prints.

In 2008, I purchased my first digital camera when I became convinced that the quality of the images equaled that which I could make with my medium format film camera. Digital cameras quickly evolved so that current image quality far exceeds that of my old film images.

After I retired from my practice of cardiology, I was privileged to make some volunteer medical missions to countries in Central and South America, Africa and Asia. On the last day of each trip, I tried to photograph willing patients in our clinics. I developed an interest in making images of the beautiful faces of people from various ethnicities and cultures.

For me, learning to photograph has been an exercise in learning to see the beauty and wonder in a world that can be confusing, hostile and ugly. Mother Teresa said it well: “The world is hungry not only for food but also for beauty.” The renowned National Geographic photographer, Dewitt Jones, expresses a similar sentiment: “God gave me photography so that I could pray with my eyes.” Photography has served me as an outlet to find and express beauty, peace and sometimes even the divine.

My interest in creating a photo website is simply to share some of my images with friends and family. I have no commercial interests and do not intend to sell these images.