I started photography while working for the United States government overseas during the late 1970's and early 1980's. My goals were to make a record of the exotic scenes and people I encountered in other countries and to accumulate a sort of visual diary of living, working and traveling through most of Europe and parts of Asia. As a result, my photography during that period was primarily documentary and personal in nature.

When I enrolled in law school upon returning to the United States in 1986, the combination of professional school and a young family left little time for photography. It wasn't until 2003 when I picked up a Canon 10D digital SLR that I resumed working in the field. Now my primary goal is to pick out and highlight relatively familiar objects, people and scenic details in the Birmingham, Alabama and surrounding area.

As a photographer I wholeheartedly subscribe to Ezra Pound's injunction to aspiring artists: "Make it New"! The combination of digital sensors, computerized imaging software and inkjet printers available today allows a degree of control of the creative process that I only dreamed of 30 years ago. Now I can produce prints that look like what I envision when I press the shutter button.

My favorite artists are Post-Impressionists such as Van Gogh, Cezanne, Seurat, Rousseau, Vuillard, Bonnard and Pissarro. I like to think that some of my prints have been influenced by painters such as these, along with their predecessors and successors Monet, Klee, Picasso, Arp, Dali and Warhol. I am most satisfied with, and take the greatest enjoyment from, making pictures that have at least some resonance with the work of one these great masters. Enthusiasm for these artists helps account for some of the characteristics of my work: heightened, intensified and saturated colors, blurred and indistinct outlines, incongruously moonlit cityscapes, and swirling skies over Birmingham's 22nd Street Viaduct.

Purists may object that what I do isn't "photography" because it is too highly manipulated and unrealistic. I'm quite content to call my work "digital imaging". The colors and shapes the Post Impressionists painted came primarily from inside their heads and out of their creative imaginations - and were only remotely based on reflected light that could have been recorded by a camera. I'm not so creative or talented. I just use a technological tool, Adobe Photoshop (TM), to bring out colors that are actually there in the scenes I photograph. Certain filters and other techniques change and heighten the hues, textures and outlines of shapes which my lenses record.

A selection of my digital images was shown at the 2006 Bluff Park Art Show and I'll be there again this year. My piece "Birmingham Blocks #1" was featured in Bluff Park's 2006 Preview Show at the Hoover Library. In addition, several of my prints have been displayed at David's Arts & Frames, Inc. in Cahaba Heights. A selection of my images can be viewed at my website: www.sjf-images.com.

My day job is tax partner with the Birmingham office of Bradley Arant Rose & White, the largest law firm in Alabama.