I was eight years old when my mother was shopping at Lit Brothers, a very old department store in Philadelphia. We happened to walk by a display of inexpensive camera and my mother purchased a plastic camera manufactured by a company called Spartacus and a little book by Kodak on how to develop photographs. Later that day, I loaded the camera with black and white film and photographed a few of my friends. I followed the instructions in the book on how to develop a negative. I was successful on my first attempt. The second step was to make a contact print, and I managed to borrow a couple of bowls from the kitchen, purchased the necessary chemicals, and made my first contact print. As soon as I saw the first images on the photographic paper, I was forever hooked.
As an adult, I started a company that made ophthalmic instrumentation. At one of the national meetings, I met Dr. Harry Brown who was the founder of an NGO called Surgical Eye Expeditions, which used lasers to treat a condition called secondary Membranes. The organization needed someone who was technically skilled and excelled at repairing instruments. I was always a gadget person, I joined the team. With the organization, I travelled all over the world to many developing countries. This gave me the opportunity to do photography in these countries after our normal workday. Dr. Brown was an avid photographer and we photographed some of the most remote locations in the world while we worked with Surgical Eye Expeditions, restoring sight to thousands of people.