My name is iAN. I write my name this way because the guy who decided to remove serifs from the world's "prettiest" fonts did so with absolutely no regard to those of us whose names begin with the letter "I". I have spent my life being called "Jan", "Ann", and even "Lan" because of that asshole.

I became interested in photography when I was nine. It was 1987 and I had recently moved from the Pacific northwest to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Part of our New Mexican integration involved joining the local 4-H club to facilitate the making of new friends. I signed up for Photography and Rocketry. I never had my own camera, and my rocket disappeared into the desert, never to be found.

I didn't stick with photography during my teenage years, and opted for a guitar over a camera. When I was seventeen years old, I combined the arts by taking photographs of my guitar. I then became a photographer for my high school newspaper, spending too much time in the darkroom, and not enough on the soccer field. I wound up on the JV team that year thanks to my addiction to dark spaces, loud music, and black & white prints. At the end of the school year, I put the camera down. I may have stuck with the art a bit longer had I not been busted for attempting to steal the definitely less-than-pro body I used for the school.

After high school I again put the camera away until October 31st, 2001, when I rushed to the Wiz to purchase a digital body to accompany me on my son's school pumpkin patch trip. That is when the bite finally held. Since that time, I have taken some 20,000 photos with a handful of bodies.

My first digital body was a Sony Cybershot DSC-P30. It was a 1.3 megapixel camera and came with a 4 meg memory stick. I couldn't afford a larger memory stick, so I stuck to shooting 640x480. By the time the Cybershot needed to be replaced, great bounds had been made in both camera and flash memory technology, to say nothing of my equally bounding salary. Over the years, I have succeeded through a range of Canon Elph bodies. The SD 200, 300, 700IS, and 850IS have served me well, though each has met an untimely demise, save the 850IS. I served a brief tour with a Casio Exilim while deployed to Iraq, but I don't much like to talk about that one. There was also a Yashica Mat 124-G medium format camera in my stash for a bit as well, but since I never had any of the film developed, it hardly seems worth mentioning.