Born and raised in Pultneyville, NY, I attended and graduated from the University of Miami, Florida, and stayed in Miami for many years before returning to Upstate New York. My father was a family shutterbug, and stirred my own interest from very early on, so that I've grown up seeing and using photography as a means of expression and communication. For all of my adult life, I've used my cameras to show affection and devotion to family, to express adoration to my most cherished, to share memories with good friends, and as a creative outlet to share my visions of the world.

I have owned and enjoyed a variety of camera equipment over the years, starting with "borrowing" my Dad's Minolta SRT201 (eventually permanently), and progressing through a Nikon EM, Nikon FM, a Nikon N2020, and of course, Great Aunt Lucy's Kodak RETINA (which I'm peering through in the picture at left).

The reason camera hardware is so important to my story is that one camera in particular altered, and even temporarily arrested my photographic development. What really caused me to take two, or maybe three, steps back in photography was my acquisition of a Kodak DC120 DIGITAL camera shortly after I started commuting back to Upstate NY in the mid-90s.

One of my first assignments here was to set up a photo studio and systematize photography of inventory items for an international sales business located in a rural area, where photo processing was a distant and expensive service. In addition to dealing with photo processing, the storing and organizing of slides and negatives was a labor intensive and complex task. Similarly expensive and demanding were the jobs of anticpating the need for, and maintaining a stock of pre-printed photographs for each inventory item, and shipping these pictures when needed, mostly via express courier, to prospects around the world. As such, our company was a natural early-adopter of digital photography, which allowed us to store and organize our "photo stock" in a digital format, where we could print photographs on-demand. It soon followed that digital photography allowed me to develop a web site for the company where we could display product photos in real time without the printing or shipping, and with much less waste, effort, and expense. 

The immediate gratification my company got from digital photography carried into my personal photographic life, where I, for better or worse, found myself using my digital camera more and more, and my 35mm cameras less and less. Photographically, I took "three steps back",  in that the early digital cameras provided very little creative control and, at best, very low photographic resolution. Still, I was hooked! I reveled in sharing digital photos via Email, on my personal web site, and to some degree on paper, and having my "digital darkroom" with me wherever I carried my laptop computer.  "Serious" creative photography became something I did once in awhile when I'd drag the Nikon out of mothballs.

My pictures improved and my options expanded as digital cameras and digital photography services developed. Photo services sprang up via the web that could print a digital photo, given sufficient resolution, like a 35mm photo. I sprung for an Olympus C2500L, the first "SLR-like" consumer digital I could afford. Still vastly inferior to any of my old 35mm SLRs, it took passable photos, some of which I am still printing and selling, but only in smaller formats, because the resolution still wasn't quite where it needed to be. I continued to dream of the day when I could have a camera equal to my trusty Nikon 35mm SLR, but with digital guts.

In 2005 I purchased a NIKON D70 Digital SLR, and finally had a digital camera that I consider to be as good or better than my 35mm film SLR. I have been releasing my pent-up desire for creative photography ever since. This is how and why michaelseye.com came to be. I hope you enjoy seeing what I see, and that some of my  images jibe with your inner vision, so that you will collect some of my prints and books, to decorate your home and share with your friends and family.