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Nature is messy. This red-purple flower gives a pop of color, while the details reveal that a spider has left some gossamer threads on the arrangement.

Photography became my primary skill in the visual arts when I was sixteen. I've learned from mentors and teachers: Lamar Philpot, Wallace Wilson, Evon Streetman, Randy Batista, and Laurie Hitzig. Alfred Stieglitz's vociferous defense of photography as an art form in itself appeals to me, though Stieglitz's subjective and sometimes vindictive determinations of who was in and who was out of serious artistic consideration does not. I prefer a mode of photography that puts most of the effort in up-front, before the shutter snaps, and reserve the use of many of the techniques Stieglitz approved of as manipulations to exceptional cases. The primary manipulation of the photographer is to concentrate the attention of the viewer to the same subject...