Allow me to introduce myself. I realize that I've been here a good 8 months and I still haven't told anyone who the man behind the magazine is. I know I've drawn a lot of criticism for some of my actions here and I apologize for that. Even though I am a "member" of the forum, I don't really feel like I'm yet a member of the community...no one's fault but my own.
I'll start off by giving you guys a little bit of background about who I am. I was born in Brooklyn, NY March 3, 1979. I lived in Long Island up until I was 9 where my parents and I moved down to FL for financial reasons. When I was an early teenager, I started writing my own comic book characters and by the age of 16 I had over 150 of them. I managed to raise a lot of eyebrows and was recruited into one of the nation's top vocational high schools for commercial art. There, I learned advertising, marketing and graphic design while earning a high school diploma. Out of my class of 20, I am the only non-millionaire. This is a statistic I wish to change very quickly. When I was 21, I got a private student loan from college and moved back to NY to be closer to my family. I got a job as an advertising sales executive for a national trade magazine and quickly learned the ins and outs of the magazine publishing business. A year and a half after I moved back to NY, I got in over my head in debt because I was making a lot of poor decisions for myself and had to move back in with my parents. I took the previous knowledge of sales and applied it to another passion of mine: cars. In 2002, after only 3 months in the car business I became one of the nation's top 50 salesmen for Ford. I stayed in the car business for 11 months when I was getting fed up with some of the dis-honesty and snakes roaming around me. My then girlfriend's best friend was starting a new business and he needed a salesman to help sell advertising space on his website. So in 2003, I moved back up to NY and started working with an online price comparison engine.
Up two years, his website has grown from nothing to one the internet's leading price-comparison engines and have sold almost 500 new accounts in the past two years.
When I'm not getting other fellow APUGgers steaming mad at me, I enjoy studying politics, philosophy, religion and physics (string theory anyone?). I am a proud Jewish Conservative Republican who has had offers to have my own poetry published and sold in bookstores nationwide. I love sitting around a table in a coffee shop, being outnumbered 20 to 1 in a political or philisophical debate and then going home the victor. I am a HUGE lover of dogs...if the human race one day evolves to the level of dogs, it would be a massive accomplishment. At this point in my life, I'm not overly religious... but I know that with time that will change. I have been living with my beautiful, wonderful girlfriend of 10 months for 9 months (yes, we moved in on our one month anniversary). After 2 and a half months of dating, we adopted a 3 month old lab/pit bull/chow mix who is the friendliest, most loving, most loyal dog in the world.
Now that I've taken up photography as a hobby, I find old, abandoned buildings and cars that have been previously set afire as great subject shots. I think New York City is the greatest place in the world, because it is the only city that moves at my pace...in business and in love, I am an extremely agressive person, however; nothing matters to me in life more than family.
Running my own business and working with another combined with having an 11 month old puppy to take care of and a wonderful girlfriend to keep happy doesn't afford me much time to make a lot of friends. But the friends I do have, I keep close to me. I choose who I call "friend" very cautiously as I've been burned a lot in life by people whom I've felt the closest to.
I may be only 26, but a lot of people view me as an old soul. Those who know me from my youngest ages remember that I was always waiting to find the right girl, get married, have a lot of kids and settle down on a ranch out in Eastern Long Island...and those were my goals when I was 4...think how much time I've had to expand upon them!
In the past couple of years that I've been studying black and white photography...I've grown such a tremendous love for it. It's truly it's own art form that I find is probably the most difficult to create. You can stand anywhere in any environment and paint and sculpt or write or sing...but to be a photographer, you have to have the right chemicals, the right film, be at the right place in the right moment with the proper amount of light and contrast...
I personally find digital photography as a lazy man's way out. Sure for family gatherings and memorable stuff I have a digital camera, you can't beat taking 250 photos, uploading them to your hard drive without any printing or scanning and being able to send them to your family thousands of miles away 5 minutes after the picture was taken. But I'm interested in, as a hobby, being an artistic photographer...and that requires film, chemicals, paper...a dark room. One of the greatest things is that I feel my interest in black and white photography comes at a time very much like San Francisco 1839...about 10 years before the gold rush. I'd like to believe from the studying I've done of the art, that within 10 years, black and white photography will be everywhere...and the creators of this art will only benefit from the black and white revolution!
My biggest fear is dying tomorrow not having lived today to it's fullest. Although I'm not overly religious, I do believe in God and his ability to end your life when he feels it's time. Tomorrow is never guaranteed and so, today must be enjoyed to its fullest. I think if I were to ever be very serious in philosophy, I would postulate that the purpose of existence is simply...to exist. We are here to live in the good, the bad and the evil of this world...to experience all that there is to experience and then when we have learned all we can...*SNAP!*
I'll start off by giving you guys a little bit of background about who I am. I was born in Brooklyn, NY March 3, 1979. I lived in Long Island up until I was 9 where my parents and I moved down to FL for financial reasons. When I was an early teenager, I started writing my own comic book characters and by the age of 16 I had over 150 of them. I managed to raise a lot of eyebrows and was recruited into one of the nation's top vocational high schools for commercial art. There, I learned advertising, marketing and graphic design while earning a high school diploma. Out of my class of 20, I am the only non-millionaire. This is a statistic I wish to change very quickly. When I was 21, I got a private student loan from college and moved back to NY to be closer to my family. I got a job as an advertising sales executive for a national trade magazine and quickly learned the ins and outs of the magazine publishing business. A year and a half after I moved back to NY, I got in over my head in debt because I was making a lot of poor decisions for myself and had to move back in with my parents. I took the previous knowledge of sales and applied it to another passion of mine: cars. In 2002, after only 3 months in the car business I became one of the nation's top 50 salesmen for Ford. I stayed in the car business for 11 months when I was getting fed up with some of the dis-honesty and snakes roaming around me. My then girlfriend's best friend was starting a new business and he needed a salesman to help sell advertising space on his website. So in 2003, I moved back up to NY and started working with an online price comparison engine.
Up two years, his website has grown from nothing to one the internet's leading price-comparison engines and have sold almost 500 new accounts in the past two years.
When I'm not getting other fellow APUGgers steaming mad at me, I enjoy studying politics, philosophy, religion and physics (string theory anyone?). I am a proud Jewish Conservative Republican who has had offers to have my own poetry published and sold in bookstores nationwide. I love sitting around a table in a coffee shop, being outnumbered 20 to 1 in a political or philisophical debate and then going home the victor. I am a HUGE lover of dogs...if the human race one day evolves to the level of dogs, it would be a massive accomplishment. At this point in my life, I'm not overly religious... but I know that with time that will change. I have been living with my beautiful, wonderful girlfriend of 10 months for 9 months (yes, we moved in on our one month anniversary). After 2 and a half months of dating, we adopted a 3 month old lab/pit bull/chow mix who is the friendliest, most loving, most loyal dog in the world.
Now that I've taken up photography as a hobby, I find old, abandoned buildings and cars that have been previously set afire as great subject shots. I think New York City is the greatest place in the world, because it is the only city that moves at my pace...in business and in love, I am an extremely agressive person, however; nothing matters to me in life more than family.
Running my own business and working with another combined with having an 11 month old puppy to take care of and a wonderful girlfriend to keep happy doesn't afford me much time to make a lot of friends. But the friends I do have, I keep close to me. I choose who I call "friend" very cautiously as I've been burned a lot in life by people whom I've felt the closest to.
I may be only 26, but a lot of people view me as an old soul. Those who know me from my youngest ages remember that I was always waiting to find the right girl, get married, have a lot of kids and settle down on a ranch out in Eastern Long Island...and those were my goals when I was 4...think how much time I've had to expand upon them!
In the past couple of years that I've been studying black and white photography...I've grown such a tremendous love for it. It's truly it's own art form that I find is probably the most difficult to create. You can stand anywhere in any environment and paint and sculpt or write or sing...but to be a photographer, you have to have the right chemicals, the right film, be at the right place in the right moment with the proper amount of light and contrast...
I personally find digital photography as a lazy man's way out. Sure for family gatherings and memorable stuff I have a digital camera, you can't beat taking 250 photos, uploading them to your hard drive without any printing or scanning and being able to send them to your family thousands of miles away 5 minutes after the picture was taken. But I'm interested in, as a hobby, being an artistic photographer...and that requires film, chemicals, paper...a dark room. One of the greatest things is that I feel my interest in black and white photography comes at a time very much like San Francisco 1839...about 10 years before the gold rush. I'd like to believe from the studying I've done of the art, that within 10 years, black and white photography will be everywhere...and the creators of this art will only benefit from the black and white revolution!
My biggest fear is dying tomorrow not having lived today to it's fullest. Although I'm not overly religious, I do believe in God and his ability to end your life when he feels it's time. Tomorrow is never guaranteed and so, today must be enjoyed to its fullest. I think if I were to ever be very serious in philosophy, I would postulate that the purpose of existence is simply...to exist. We are here to live in the good, the bad and the evil of this world...to experience all that there is to experience and then when we have learned all we can...*SNAP!*
