I live in Menlo Park, California. I’ve been writing here since 2001.
The work that paid for the grey hair was operating jobs at IBM, Visa, Fidelity, and First Data, then twelve years building Glenbrook Partners, a payments advisory I co-founded. I retired from Glenbrook in 2016. Before that I sat inside Visa’s transaction stream and tried to notice the one drop moving wrong. I still notice for a living. Nobody hands me a queue.
I came to street photography late. Landscape work asked for dawn and dusk; I didn’t want the middle of the day empty. In January 2013 I spent six days in Havana and understood the other way around: bright light, hard shadow, people. I’ve walked with a camera since — San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, Rome, the Indian cities, wherever the street will have me. Jay Maisel said light, gesture, and color, and be open. I was in one of his last workshops. I say those sentences to myself still.
The blog is a public notebook. Most of it is thinking out loud. A few times a year I write something I’d stand behind — payments, pictures, a radio station that used to live in the kitchen, what a day is for after the screens go dark. Some of my photographs live on the portfolio.
Family and friends are the real masters. The rest was luck and paying attention. And trying to seek serendipity whenever I can.
If you want to say hello, drop me a note.
Garrison Keillor: “Be well, do good work, and stay in touch.”
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