Originally posted by david94903 Sorry for your loss. Thanks for sharing Brian's Flickr. Nice portfolio of work.
He was an amazing photographer. I first met him through a friend something like 45 years ago. This little guy on crutches who was able to move faster on them than most people could run. Always had a couple of really bashed up Leica rangefinders around his neck. They would swing around and get whacked by his crutches. Amazingly tough little cameras.
Later in life, after a couple of falls he ended up being confined to a wheelchair, he spent the last 20 years of his life in one.
He was one of the first people I knew who took up digital, partly because he could no longer stand up to make wet prints, partly because it was a brand new technology to explore. He initially scanned negatives with an HP Photosmart scanner. He used Photoshop from version one when it came out in the late 1980s.
He moved from the Leicas to Pentax, and then to Nikon, Canon and eventually Panasonic and Olympus.
He was the one who got me interested in Pentax. I was using Nikon, and getting increasingly dissatisfied with the brand. I was using an F3, and not really liking it because of the viewfinder, and a 50 f/1.2 that literally fell apart in my hands didn't improve my mood, and was looking at the F4, and not really liking it either. Nikon was moving away from what i wanted into great big monster cameras that shot postage stamp sized negatives. He talked me into looking at the LX, and I was hooked. It was exactly what i wanted in a camera. As he was moving away from Pentax and towards Nikon because of a business decision by his employer, I ended up buying a lot of his lenses. I got some very good glass for next to nothing from him.
Sorry, that's probably pretty boring, but it felt kinda good to get it out.