Welcome!

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you enjoy your stay. This is meant to be a visual site so I won't bog you down on a lot of text here. If you want to just get on with looking through my portfolio you can just go ahead and hit the "Photos" button above and you'll be taken there without further delay.

Okay, If you've stuck around here this long you must want to know something about what you'll find here and why it's sitting here on the web. To put it simply, it exists only because I'm obsessed with taking photographs and I need someplace to show them off. I've got a few photo sharing accounts out there, primarily on Flickr, but I really wanted to be able to control the format of my albums so that they were more unique to me. Therefore, I decided to put this little oasis together and make it available to anyone that might be interested in looking at my stuff.

What you will find here is primarily outdoor, natural light photography. This does not mean that it is exclusively nature photos but more a matter of things that you might see when you went out for a walk. I personally feel as though there are excellent photos to be found just about anywhere I might find myself and it's my task as a photographer to find and capture them. Another driving theme of my work is that while something might seem perfectly ordinary and mundane to one person it could be exotic and new to someone else. It's not about whether you've taken enough pictures of something but more about whether you've taken your best picture of it. Besides, just because something is ordinary or common does not mean that it is not beautiful.

You may have also noticed the NIU banner logo on the right side of your screen. I have added this in recent months as recognition of the tragedy befell my daughter, Ryanne Mace, in the classroom shooting that occurred on February 14, 2008. Ryanne, our only child, was one of the five students that were murdered that day and it is because of her that I have put as much into my photography as I have. You see, I was out taking pictures at the time she was killed and continuing to do so has been very therapeutic for me. I have also added that ribbon to help to raise awareness of the scholarship fund that my wife, Mary Kay, and I have started in Ryanne's name - The Ryanne Mace Memorial Scholarship Fund. This fund has been established as an endowed fund which means that it will never be depleted and will live on for many years into the future. The financial assistance that the fund will provide will be focused on students that are pursuing a post graduate degree in clinical psychology with the intent of becoming counselors in hopes that those who receive this assistance will be able to achieve the goal that Ryanne had for her life.

I have no desire to collect money through this site, I only want to let you know about the fund in case you might want to make a donation to it. The fund is fully maintained by the Northern Illinois University Foundation and I have no control over how the money is invested or managed. My only vested interested in the fund at this point is to see that it grows to the point to where it can do as much good as Ryanne wanted to do. If you click on the ribbon, you will be transported to the NIU foundation where you can get more information about how they do things. You can also contact Teri Gensler at (815)753-1301 to find out anything that you might want to know about the fund and how to contribute to it. Any and all gifts are greatly appreciated and you'll get some good karma and a tax deduction to boot. It is through this scholarship that Ryanne's desire to improve the future for others can be achieved, even in her absence.