All About Me . . . why me?
I am a native Texan having spent my first 20 years or so on the high plains of that state. Small town guy with an interest in music, art and photography. I studied architecture at Texas Technological College, now Texas Tech University, graduating in 1960 after cramming a 5-year curriculum into six years. The local Draft Board prevented me from launching an immediate career in architecture and led me to enter the U. S. Navy.
Before entering military service I received very good advice to become an officer of whatever service I chose, so that I did. It was off to Newport, Rhode Island, for Officer Candidate School and on commissioning as a proud ensign, sent to Port Hueneme, California, for further training for the Navy's Civil Engineer Corps. Within six months of finishing at Texas Tech, I was on my way to Japan for my first navy assignment. There met and married my love and had born our first son.
The navy was a good life. After leaving the service for a year, I re-entered thinking that I was going to be called back anyway because of Vietnam. This time I stayed for the completion of a 25 year navy career. We were sent to Beaufort, SC (with the Marine Corps), Thailand (for construction of Air Force bases), Guam, Vietnam (as Advisor on roadway and roadway equipment maintenance), Las Vegas (Nevada Atomic Test Site), Japan for another 4 years, Hawaii (with Navy's Pacific and Marine Corps' Pacific commands) and finally, Beeville, TX, located between San Antonio and Corpus Christi.
Retired from the navy in 1986 and found employment in Cincinnati, Ohio, as a Construction Manager with a local general contractor. After 13 years, I retired 100 percent in year 2000.
With retirement came a renewed interest in photography and I found the digital camera was a nice fit. We also found time for traveling and the camera was always present. The challenge then became “what to do with the photographs” and how to share our travel photo with family and others? The internet was the most convenient tool if I only knew how to write the code! I learned, first by reading and studying books then moving on to more formal study with various on-line instructional sites. HTML is really a simple means of writing or coding web pages. It will look something like this to display the three emblems above:
Digital photography brings the need for a digital darkroom. The photo editing programs that make the digital darkroom work require many hours of study and practice in order to master most of powers of the editor. I started by using Adobe Photoshop Elements® which is a very good program for about one-seventh the cost of the full industry leading Photoshop. I am now using almost exclusively Photoshop Creative Cloud® which has some truly amazing tools.