Pacific Pieces- Rodeo Beach Sunset

Rodeo Beach, Sausalito, California Ever since my childhood, I have been drawn to the ocean. I grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan, the closest thing to an ocean Chicago has to offer, but that Great Lake paled in comparison to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans where my family and I would occasionally vacation. I became a professional photographer in the late 1980s. I worked at Chicago newspapers until 2014 when I accepted a job at the San Francisco Chronicle. It was here in Northern California that I started making moody abstract images of the Pacific Ocean that I have dubbed my "Pacific Series." These photos fit perfectly into the genre of photography that I love to create- images at the intersection of beauty and sadness. As an extension of my Pacific Series, I began to use Photoshop to cut out pieces of the images and splice them back together into "Pacific Pieces."