The summer of 1966, I hitch-hiked alone for two months all over Europe instead of working on a farm in Spain. It was a big game to see how much I could see on $400. This got me hooked on traveling.

Pre-planning is essential. Research, research, research. If you are going to do a portrait, know as much as you can about the person beforehand. The web makes this very easy.

My modus operandi after working for a decade as a self-funding freelancer, was to spend as little money as possible to get the job done, even if it was on someone else's nickel.

Europeans still read rather than watching TV or listening to their clergyman tell them how to vote. The European magazines are far superior to American magazines in content and readership, but TV is taking a bite out of circulation now even in Europe.

It's important to get a translator who will ask the questions in a sensitive and thoughtful way. Knowing the ethnicity issues, the tribal issues in some places...who your translator is can mean a lot.

As a senior in high school my counselor recommended that I soften my science and math direction with an art course. Fortunately my high school offered a new course in B&W photography, so I opted for that instead of art, towards which I had an aversion. Composition is something that comes pretty naturally to me and I appreciate ordered chaos: the photo class turned out to be fun.

After I discovered my degree in photojournalism would only get me a job in a camera store, I taught myself lighting. I read tons of magazines and books and studied the photos trying to figure out how they were done. I bought some flash equipment and played around until I figured out how to make a subject look as I envisioned it should look.