There are very few conversations I remember having with either of my parents while growing up. But one brief exchange with my father is alive in my mind as if it happened yesterday, and probably speaks volumes about what I’m doing here. It was while I was a high school senior and it began with: “So what are you doing after graduation?”

Before I give away my answer, and his conversation ending response, a bit of background on both of us.

My father and his brother operated a small furniture upholstery shop in an area of Boston known as the Fenway (very close to the ballpark with the same name). At that time the area was home to many artists and students from several surrounding colleges. I remember the shop’s big glass storefront, usually adorned with their most recent finished piece of furniture, or one that was awaiting payment before delivery. From time to time, he’d let one of the neighborhood artists place a landscape or portrait in the window, hoping for a sale.

As for myself, a bookish kid, good grades, quiet, destined to be the first in the family to “do” something after high school that was different from learning a skilled trade and working at it for the rest of my life. After all it was the 60’s, and by then and doing something more was becoming the norm. A couple of years earlier I was given a camera for Christmas, and that little Japanese twin lens reflex camera, brought back from WWII by my newly minted brother-in-law, had found a home hanging around my neck. It was called a hobby back then; Pong and Space Invaders were still a decade or more in the future.

From almost the first time the “after graduation” question was asked “become an engineer” was my reflex response. Never thought I’d make it across the river to study at the elite MIT, but Northeastern University, also near that famous Fenway area, turned out engineers by the truckload. I could do that! But over the summer months that little box hanging around my neck started whispering to me: “I’m fun! I’m easy!” And right next door to Northeastern was the Massachusetts College of Art, probably the place that produced some of those artists trying to sell their work in my dad’s storefront.

So my answer to that question about after graduation was a little less reflexive: “Probably Northeastern….. or maybe Mass College of Art.” There it was, out in the open for the first time.

There was a slight pause and then “You know, there are a lot of down and out artists coming into my store all the time asking to sell their work just to pay the rent.” Full stop.

Five years later, when I graduated from Northeastern with a BSEE (Electrical Engineering), that day was the closest I came to my childhood dream of being an engineer. I’m not saying that with regret, it just turned out that my path led me to a career in customer support, rather than design. During the thirty plus years I worked in high tech I got to visit and live in some great places around the world.

During those years my photo hobby was reduced to taking occasional tourist snaps. It wasn’t until my career in high tech transitioned into a career in higher ed that I began spending more time with a camera again. In large part that was because by then the promise of a digital darkroom was becoming a reality. Computers and printers became a viable alternative to trays of chemical solutions. And as home computers became more powerful, image manipulation software like Photoshop and Corel Painter allowed me to produced images that were far more pleasing to me than anything that ever came back to me when I sent my rolls of film to Walmart for developing.

When deciding on a name for my blog, I couldn’t think of anything more fitting than my favorite insult to the English language, the dangling preposition. After all, the ‘E’ in my degree is for Engineering, not English. And if you venture further into what I have to say it will become obvious that the letter preceding the E is an ‘S’ (Science) rather than an ‘A’ (Art). Those two facts probably explain why I think of what I do with images as a craftwork, rather than artwork.

By now you have probably played around with the slider on the image at the top of the page. All the images you see at this site start out as photographs, as this before/after comparison shows. Anyone with a digital camera, some software, and the courage to experiment can get similar results. I hope over time to share some of the techniques I use to produce images like this.