I learned photography by shooting pictures, processing my own film and looking at images -- lots of images. My teachers were fellow photographers, friends like the photojournalist D. Gorton and the designer Robert Overby who had the best eye of anyone I've ever met. Overby told me that I could create all the images I needed to make in my own backyard, metaphorically speaking. Form and content became my children; photography, my life.I was drawn to the work of Walker Evans, Bill Brandt, Robert Frank, Bruce Davidson, Ralph Gibson, Lee Friedlander, W. Eugene Smith and the frontier photographers of the American West.I became a street shooter of sorts, on Venice Beach (literally, my backyard), at LAX, briefly in New York City and even in Spain. I was learning about visual imagery -- what's important, what's not -- drawn to what I found interesting.