I’ve been taking pictures all my life. My parents bought me my first camera – a Kodak Instamatic – when I was 10 years old. I took pictures of everything: people, places, animals, nature, and inanimate objects. It didn’t matter what, I just loved taking pictures. One of the most exciting things about photography back then was taking rolls of undeveloped film cartridges to the local drugstore and waiting days to see the prints once they were ready. They’d come back freshly delivered in yellow Kodak envelopes with center dividers separating the prints from the negatives. I still have hundreds of them.
It was also a time when I developed a lifelong interest in history. Growing up in Boston, my parents would take me to all the historic Revolutionary War-era sites, where, naturally, I’d take lots of pictures. I was 16 when we moved to Northern Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington DC., and I spent the entire first summer there exploring our nation’s capital. Later, during my college years at Virginia Tech, I visited many of the Civil War-era battlefields, such as Gettysburg, Manassas, and Antietam. These places left an indelible mark on me.
