Hi, I’m Steve. I am a passionate salsa dancer, a lover of travel and nature, and an avid hobbyist photographer. I was born and raised in New Jersey, went to college in the Boston area, attended grad school and worked for some years in northern California, and worked some more years in Colorado. I then moved to Europe, first to the northern part of Germany and then to Denmark, where I now have been living for over half my life.

I first became acquainted with photography in the early 70’s during my college years, spending hours in the dormitory dark room developing and printing photos taken with an analog camera. I lost interest after graduating but picked it up again after buying my first decent digital camera about 9 years ago.

I got my first taste of real travel after finishing grad school in 1978. I hitchhiked solo around Europe for five weeks, from London to Switzerland and back again. I fell in love with Europe of the time, with the sense of adventure, with being surrounded by different cultures and languages. This was the start of an urge to do something different with my life. I wound up quitting my first job after a few years to travel around Europe and North Africa for a year and a half somewhere around 1980 to ’81. After returning home I lasted only a little over two years before quitting my second job to move to Europe in 1985. I worked as a grad student/researcher in Germany for four years and then sheer coincidence took me to Denmark where I have been ever since.

It was in 1997, in Copenhagen, that I first started to dance salsa. Not knowing how to partner dance at all, a friend suggested I take salsa lessons. First I learned from a Colombian dancer but later changed to Cuban style. Years later I started to learn and dance the linear LA style, and then afterwards I changed to New York style. With each passing year, salsa became a more important part of my life. I spent more and more of my free time dancing and I attended a greater number of festivals and events each year.

The first time I took photos of social dancing was about ten years ago at a daytime salsa social in London. The results were not great but I had fun with it and the photos were received well by my salsa friends. I started to take the camera with me to salsa events more often, and with practice both shooting the photos and post processing them steadily improved. And it is still improving, I am still a learner and hope I always will be.

By no means am I an event photographer. My style is quite different from those who are hired or asked to take photos at events. I don’t use flash and instead make do with whatever ambient light is available. I also use a longer lens, bringing me much closer to the subjects from further away. A result of this is that I need to do quite a bit of individualized adjustments on my photos before I can post them. I can spend anywhere from three minutes to over half an hour on a single photo.

So now we come to what this blog is intended to be about. In my posts here I would like to share with you some of my thoughts, my ideas and my favorite photos of dancing, travel and nature. While doing so I would like to also share with you what I have learned along my photography journey, about how I shoot my photos and retouch them afterwards. I sincerely hope you will enjoy my posts and visit often.

Update

The original intention for this blog site was to cover various topics of interest to me including dance, travel, nature, photography and more. And I may just revert to a broader focus at some point. However, now that the first several posts have been written, I seem to be concentrating on the photography of social dance theme. Accordingly, I have modified this site’s subtitle, for now, but I will leave this About section unchanged.