djwhelan's photostream  

Where do you start? Take a look at my sets (including some shots of moi), which try to bring some order to this chaos.

Where do I start? As a guy who has been relatively fickle about hobbies over the years, I’ve been playing around with photography for a surprisingly long time. I started in my early teens with a Yashica Electro 35 that had belonged to my father. Starting with a viewfinder camera, it was only a few years before I had to have more. I saved and saved from my newspaper route, and in 1986 or so, I bought the brand-new Canon T90, which was destined to become a famous SLR (and perhaps the last great non-AF SLR). That camera (and some lenses that I “borrowed” from my father) stayed with me for years, through various travels and ebbs and flows of my photography. I spent four months in the UK in late 2001, and the T90 was there with me to capture a multitude of images.

Digital was beckoning, but I was resistant. Finally, I dipped my toe into the post-analog waters in mid-2003 with a Canon PowerShot S400, which seemed to be one of the smallest four-megapixel models on the market at the time. I haven’t touched my T90 since. I simply love digital, and I don’t think I’m going back. For a while, I was posting a bunch of photos on homepage.mac.com/djwhelan/ImageIsEverything, but then I discovered Flickr, and life hasn’t been the same. I’m taking more photographs. I’m thinking more about photography. And I’m planning my entrée back into the SLR world, perhaps with the Canon EOS 20D, which seems like a descendant of my venerable T90, although nothing will ever replace the T90.

And what am I doing when I am not taking pictures? I suppose I would call myself a businessman and entrepreneur by day, although I dream of being a creative soul by night. Visions of music producer, architect, fashion designer, fashion photographer, and restaurateur flash through my head often, and I have come close to at least the last one, albeit as an investor rather than operator. At the moment, I am helping to shepherd the launches of a few creative businesses, as well as spending a lot of time with the strategic planning and marketing of a fitness and nutrition company—kind of a twist on the creative business theme. However, in the end, I am much more of an appreciator of creativity than a creator. I really am most happy when experiencing a bit of creativity—music, architecture, fashion, literature, whatever. That goes especially for music, which stirs my soul.

Music of all kinds is really important to me, and I am always trying to make personal connections to it, perhaps because I can't create it myself. I have tried to do that, but those cello and sax lessons back in grade school just never lit my fire. So it's music appreciation all the way for me. I love to explore new music, on CDs, MP3s, KCRW, in clubs, live, anywhere. I was a radio DJ in college. I have done the Musical Pub Crawl in Dublin. I have been to the Cavern Club in Liverpool. I trekked to the outskirts of London just to see the parking lot the Kinks sang about in “Come Dancing.”

Travel is perhaps the only thing I love more than music. My last major travel was an extended one—four too short months in London. I was there to study at London Business School and also to try living someplace outside the US. While there, I spent some time in Paris, Germany, and Italy. Other travels over the past few years have taken me to Australia, Ibiza, Ireland, and back to the UK.

Back to the basics, I was born in Germany and grew up all along the East Coast, primarily in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. I’ve been in California since 1989. I came out here for undergrad at Stanford Univerity and couldn’t leave the Bay Area until 2000, when I moved to LA for business school at the UCLA Anderson School. And LA is where you will find me today and for the foreseeable future.

Oh, and I tend to ramble....