I have worked as a professional designer, illustrator, and photographer for over 40 years. I love using my brain to envision something new, then with my artistic ability make my visions a reality for all to see. Most of my friends would say I've spent 40 years just having fun and not working. For me creating has always been more fun than work, so in a way they are right. I really have spent my life just having fun!
I’m in my 60’s now, and thanks to a low key lifestyle, and saving my money when times were good, I don’t have to work anymore unless I want to. I never really worked just to make a lot of money so I could impress people with the things I could buy. I've always thought it was much better to have people like me for who I am, rather than for what I own. I do believe in the old saying "money can't buy you happiness". I have known a lot of unhappy people with lots of money, because that was all they lived for. The way I see it is, the one thing money can buy you is freedom. Freedom to tell a boss, or client, if they want you to do something you don't like, to "take their job and shove it".
These days I spend my time doing only things I enjoy, that includes playing all of the sports I played in my 30's, plus a few more new ones. Even when I'm not out riding my bike, playing golf, or two man sand volleyball, I'm still active mentally and physically at home designing and making things, like custom designed video and photo gear. I even built a hand made acoustic guitar just to see if I could do it.
I’ve been traveling a lot the past few years, I've taken up hiking, and backpacking, and have a senior pass so I get into all the national parks for free. So far I've hiked in seven National Parks. I've been to many countries outside of the US, and have seen some amazing things, but parts of the US are so beautiful they can take your breath away. Sorry to say most people these days (young & old) will never get to experience the beauty of our country up close, because they are just too out of shape from wasting their lives sitting in front of televisions, computers, and video games, or they have to keep working just to pay for all their possessions they think they need.
Background on the building of this web page.
I built my first web page advertising myself as a Graphic Designer back in 1997 just to see if I could do it. It was among the first individual pages on the net. At the time most people didn't have the time or knowledge to build a web page because you had to write your own HTML code. When I put up my web page, web search engines were new, and used hidden meta data built into commercial web pages to locate pages in their search. I knew how to add this code to my page so when you searched for Graphic Designer, my page would always come up near the top of most search engines. Then Yahoo came along and took over the search engine market by letting people pay to get a higher ranking in a web search. After the pay for ranking system took over thousands of designers started advertising on the web, and came up ahead of me because they were willing to pay a fee for a higher listing. Having my own page before Yahoo & Google came along was great fun, because I would get hundreds of e-mails a year from all over the world, with questions about me, my work, and from companies wanting bids on jobs.
All this was in the early days of the internet (only dial-up) so all web pages were very limited as to graphics and file sizes, but my page was still very cool for it's time. Mine was one of the first web pages to use the new animated flash file format. This was way before Adobe took over the technology from Macromedia. After that first page, I built many commercial web sites for my clients, but I never bothered to update my own page, so in 2002 I took it down. A few years ago I took about $10,000 worth of my pro camera gear on a trip to Costa Rica, Shortly after that I bought a domain name and put up a personal web site so the people I met on that trip could have some professional photos of our adventure. This page is an expansion of that original page for my friends, and family to see my photos, and videos. The original Costa Rica page is now just a linked part of this new site, but still has some amazing photos.
For more info about me, or to see photos & videos of my travels, and projects just click on the links below.
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