In loving memory of Charline, my wife of 46 years who passed away on January 26, 2024. She will always be remembered for her love of family and generous donations of time and effort supporting numerous educational and historical organizations in Orange County and nationally.

I am now retired after getting a Ph. D. in electrical engineering and spending my working career designing state‑of‑the‑art integrated circuits that have gone into various military, medical and telecommunications devices, factory control systems, automotive electronics, and computer peripherals. During this entire 40‑year time span, model photography has been my hobby. However, 60+ hours per week career demands ensured that I never had time to make even $1 from it. For me it has always been, and continues to be, strictly an expensive hobby.

After I retired, I had a medical disaster occur. In December 2017, my cardiologist changed one of my medications to Amiodarone. A handful of people per million are allergic to that drug. I am part of that group. Over the next 6 months it silently gave me a case of pneumonia that nearly killed me. Beginning in July 2018, I was hospitalized for a total of 10 straight weeks, with 1 week of it on a respirator and all of the remaining time in intensive care. In fact, I was actually discharged directly from intensive care!! By the time I returned home, my heart’s efficiency had dropped to 20% (normal is 70-80% or better). Mentally, I did not remember the names of my neighbors or streets near my house where I have lived for the past 35 years. I had to relearn details of many things that I had previously known forwards and backwards. Physically, my heart’s inefficiency forced me to return to intensive care every month to drain fluid buildup from my lungs. Finally, in March 2019 I had recovered sufficiently that my cardiologists were able to implant a pacemaker. During the years since then it has raised my heart's efficiency to where I now have no significant activity restrictions. Recovery continues to be a work in progress, but overall, I am able to lead a very normal life. Modern medicine is marvelous!!

It goes without saying that the above ordeal significantly changed my outlook on life. Photography continues to be my primary hobby, but what I want to get from it during my retirement years has changed considerably. Fortunately, engineers have always been well paid, so I have no need to generate any income from photoshoots. This allows my future shoots to be strictly for‑fun events, which suits me just fine. Going forward I will be shooting who I want, and the shoot content will be whatever I and the model jointly agree to. From my side, there will be no worrying about commercial considerations like who can I sell something to and for what. On the flip side, if any model wants to use the photoshoot results for financial gain, she has my blessings to do so without any requirement to share the profits with me.

While I was recovering my health, I decided that I should focus on doing only one type of photography and doing it well. For me, the most challenging and fun shoots create videos that involve dance, workout and/or other movement-based activities against a green screen. I had started shooting those types of videos in 2014, but at that time I still had a full‑time engineering job and lacked non‑work time to do the conversion correctly.

Now that my life has returned to something that resembles normal, I have given away my old cameras and thrown away almost everything else that I had used in the studio (backdrops, lighting, all of it). I bought all new everything with a focus on being able to create high‑quality videos. My new camera is a Sony FDR‑AX100. It shoots beautiful 4K videos. The new studio has a 12‑feet wide by 10‑feet deep green screen floor that is surrounded on 3 sides by 8‑feet high green screen walls. LED panels have replaced 2000 Watts of incandescent lighting. No more having the shooting area mimic an oven during Southern California's frequently warm weather!