I started drawing when I was three. My babysitter was kind enough to save quite a few of my early drawings, which seem to focus on spaceships, airplanes, Star Trek, and futuristic buildings. And bugs. I guess I've stayed pretty true to my early interests: most of my artwork is science or science fictional in origin, and I got my Bachelor's degree in biology, so I guess the bugs are represented in an indirect way, too. And my photography concentrates in astronomy, airplanes, landscapes and architecture. We don't stray very far from our origins, I suppose.

I use a host of digital tools to create these images. I started using MacPaint in 1985, when my friend and psychopharmacology professor Frank Etscorn (at New Mexico Tech) first showed me his Macintosh 512K. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. A digital drawing tool! Amazing! When I transferred to the University of New Mexico, I discovered the Mac Lab in Johnson Gym, and I was completely hooked. I taught myself Adobe Illustrator Version 1, without the manual. Then it was on to Cricket Draw, SuperPaint, DTP applications like PageMaker and Quark XPress, Photoshop, PixelPaint, StrataVision 3D, Bryce, InfiniD, Poser, Painter, and on and on. I even know how to use the GIMP, but it's pretty clumsy compared to Photoshop.

I don't get as much time to create art as I used to, but that's mostly because I'm concentrating on photography these days. I use a Nikon Coolpix 990, which has held up pretty well over the years, and am now using a slide scanner to digitize the slides I'm shooting with my Minolta Maxxum 7. I love film photography. It's a lot more expensive than digital photography, which is great, don't get me wrong, but I love the look of film. I'm planning to move up to large format cameras next year. And get a better digital camera, of course. I'm leaning towards the Foveon-based cameras, although Sigma is the only manufacturer of a camera based on that chipset. Hopefully others will appear. Foveon's technology sounds enormously promising, but I'm reluctant to buy a first generation camera. I'd like them to work out the bugs first.