Carmen Petruzzi

I was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY and moved to New Jersey in the ‘70s where I lived until moving to Maryland in 2018 to be close to my two children and four grandchildren. I graduated from Pace University in New York City with a Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting and most of my working career was with the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey where I held various positions in finance.

My interest in photography began in the late 1960s with an Instamatic Camera, which I used to take snapshots of vacations and various family events. Soon thereafter I graduated to a 35 mm SLR and the world of interchangeable lenses and higher quality prints opened up. I joined the Camera Club at work and continued getting drawn into this great hobby. I also built a very low-budget black and white darkroom and began to develop and print my work. I also experimented with developing Kodak Ektachrome slide film.

As my work and family life continued to grow, my hobby got squeezed out and I eventually sold all my equipment. Point and shoot cameras were all I used for a number of years. Then several years ago I retired and the photography bug bit me again and I entered the new world of digital images. I found this to be a fascinating world as I learned the new technology. I joined the Silver Spring Camera Club just as COVID-19 arrived so I only attended one live meeting. The Zoom meetings worked well and the club has been a great incentive for me to continue to learn and get immersed in this great hobby once again.

I live in Bethesda in an area that’s just a short walk to the C&O Canal and the Potomac River. This location provides great opportunities (and no excuses) to get out and take photos.

Larry Brauer

I always enjoyed seeing extraordinary photographs. But it was retirement that gave me the impetus to move to the other side of the camera and try to create the kinds of photos I had always admired.

I grew up in Queens, NY, then moved to Washington, DC to attend college and law school. I am a retired tax lawyer, having worked in the Washington area for many years for several large corporations, the IRS and a large national accounting firm.

My wife and I are “Snow Birds,” spending the winters in Fort Lauderdale, FL and the rest of the year in Bethesda, MD.

After buying a “starter” DSLR about seven years ago, I took my first photography class in Fort Lauderdale. This further piqued my interest in photography. When we returned to Bethesda, I looked for camera clubs I could join and SSCC attracted my attention. But because we live in Maryland only part of the year, I hesitated joining, since I could not participate in their programs or competitions while I was in Florida. Then came the pandemic and SSCC’s switch to Zoom. This enabled me to participate in the outstanding SSCC programs and challenging competitions even when I am in Florida.

I use a Nikon D3500 with a wide angle lens (18 – 55mm) and a zoom lens (70 – 300mm.) My favorite genres are street photography and architecture. I do minimal post-processing, using only the Apple Photos editing features on my computer. I always shoot in color, but in post, I will often convert an image to black and white and decide which I prefer.

I also enjoy taking photos of our grandson playing high school varsity soccer. Although I use the “sports” mode on my Nikon, getting many “WOW!” photos has been challenging. Soccer games move so very fast and there are so many players that getting “clean” shots is difficult. Additionally, many games are at night, which creates other issues. But every once in a while I do get a “winner.” and that motivates me to keep going.

Besides photography, I enjoy playing the piano, reading, traveling, and learning to cook. I never played the piano before, but early in the pandemic, I bought a keyboard and an online piano learning course and was hooked. I am still very much a beginner, but enjoy learning to play popular music, show tunes and lots of Beatles music.

A fun side gig of mine is submitting photos to an international stock photo company. When a client of theirs uses one of my photos, I get a huge royalty of 10 cents! Occasionally, my royalty will be higher, depending on the client’s relationship with the company. Needless to say, I don’t rely on these royalties to put food on the table! But I do enjoy seeing where in the world the buyers are located and which photos are the most popular. So I can proudly say that some of my photos have been seen in many foreign countries.

I plan to continue my photographic journey with SSCC and to enjoy this wonderful hobby!

Tom Allen

I have been photographing most of my life. From my time in high school, when the PR Director of the school, who had been a professional glamour photographer in NYC, became advisor for the school newspaper (of which I was the editor), he built a darkroom in an abandoned building on campus, and I was hooked! I became quite a fanatic in the 1970s, during my college and graduate school years, and wore out a couple Pentax Spotmatic cameras along the way, shooting all black and white. I was particularly inspired by the photographer Eva Rubenstein, with whom I took a summer workshop in 1977. Her work combined both a simplicity as well as a very deep emotional connection to her portrait subjects and photographs of inside, intimate spaces. After graduate school, I started a family, and, well, the next 30 years my photographs were mostly of my family, although my job (professor at Gallaudet University) enabled me to travel, and some of my nicest images were those taken on the road. Now that I am retired, I am interested in expanding my portfolio beyond my family, and I have continued my love of travel photography. My wife, Roberta, and I are fortunate to be able to travel in retirement, which we are doing a lot of, as our two sons have moved far away and in different directions, one in Los Angeles, and the other in Brooklyn. At the same time, I am passionate about my earlier work, and I have devoted considerable time to digitizing some 40-50K negatives, and restoring many images that tell the story of my life, my autobiographical visual memoir. I have loved discovering the magic of Photoshop, Light Room, and Luminar Neo, and their capacities to create images – many 40 years old, or more, that are far better than the original images, printed on my inexpensive, Omega enlarger in a makeshift dusty home-darkroom. I have taken many courses from the excellent Kelby-One website, and my skills are improving. I am delighted to be a member of the Silver Spring Camera Club, where I hope to learn more about my craft, share my work, both newly captured images and those from my life’s “body of work”, view and learn from others’ work in many styles, and get to know like-minded souls. I also continue doing research and writing from my years as a researcher and professor.