I have always been interested in photography it seems. As an adolescent a neighbor friend who had a "semi-permanent" darkroom and I would delight in seeing just how large a blow-up we could get from tiny portions of 35mm negatives as we projected the image across his basement..

In the mid 1960s another friend taught me the basics of photography and how cameras worked. He had a long 500mm telephoto lens mounted onto a rifle stock. I advised him to never take a picture of the President with that setup. We traveled to many scenic locations, and I got to use his camera, mostly for slides.

From 1969 until 1971 I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in India. Just prior to this experience that same friend helped me to purchase an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic 35mm camera. The lasting images from that era are a series of portraits in black and white of people in their natural settings. The scenics were rather mundane and of the "I was there" type.

In 1975 I purchased a second-hand, very heavily used, medium format Pentax 6x7 camera. I have done some work with a 4x5 "large" format camera. But it was in the medium format that I worked most naturally. Now, as with so many, I am using digital photography as well.

I enjoy being at locations of great grandeur. And yet, it is often the quiet, more overlooked scenes within these locales to which I am most drawn.

In the past my wife(see Victoria Ruderman Photography) aided me as my "go-fer" in that I often asked her to "go for" this or that piece of photographic equipment. Now, I am most proud to serve as her assistant as she creates beautiful hand colored manipulated Polaroid images that resonate with me, but which are so different from that which I do.