Hi! I'm Dave. 

Who am I? Why should you care?

My rise from oblivion to obscurity has been described as meteoric:  a big flash, followed by a fiery swan dive into the horizon. If you've gotten this far, you must be fairly determined, or hopelessly lost, and either way I won't take much more of your time. I started my career as a newspaper photographer. I wrote such long, involved, and accurate captions that the paper eventually promoted me to reporter-photographer, back in the days when hyphens really meant something.

After graduating from college with a degree in Journalism, Public Relations, I moved to Rochester, N.Y., where I served as a PR/photography consultant/writer with an agency serving Eastman Kodak Company, back in the days when a backslash really meant something. I continued my work for Kodak as a photojournalist while a senior partner with CCS/PR, Inc., which gave me the opportunity to roam the country taking pictures and writing articles on photography and related topics. The relationship continued for more than 20 years, even though I had other business dealings throughout that span, including a stint operating a commercial photographic studio and lab, and as a photoposing instructor for a Barbizon-affiliated modeling agency. If you think it's easy to successfully carry on both activities in Rochester, where all 50,000 employees of Kodak and a few thousand students of the Rochester Institute of Photography's photo program all moonlight with cameras, think again.

Computers enter all our lives...

In 1977, I was seduced by the dark side of technology and was miraculously transformed from a photo nerd who took glamorous photos of models like my wife, Cathy, to a computer nerd with a special emphasis on imaging. I switched from early TRS-80, Apple, and Commodore computers to an IBM PC in 1983, and added the Macintosh to my repertoire when it was introduced in 1985.

Since 1983, I've written more than 100 books on imaging and computer technology, including a clutch of camera guides dedicated to specific camera models from the Nikon D70/D70s through Nikons D40/D40x, D80, D200, and D300, along with a series of books on the Canon line, including the Canon EOS XT/XTi/30D and 40D.  You can read more about my book misadventures on the main page. Although bundling a CD-ROM with a book was fairly new when I started doing it, it became common after a few years, and is now passe. But I have to be one of the first authors to include on the CD-ROM all the figures in the book (in full-color) plus all the image files and intermediate files used in the tutorials and examples. And I was, in 1983, one of the very first to include software with a book, even though it was a cassette tape of the sort used by the Commodore VIC-20 micro.
 

I've maintained my active interest and participation in the photo world, even while I worked with computers, scanners, and digital cameras. Am I qualfied to tell you about this stuff? Well, as philosopher-spokesmodel Kelly Bundy once observed, "Those who can, do. Those who cannot, don't." I hope you'll enjoy my web site as it evolves, and will explore some of my books if you get the chance.

Click here to Meet My Family