Alumni photographers show us their favorite images

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I grew up with a father who, after the Second World War, trained as a painter and sculptor. When I was a boy, he would take me to art shows and slide shows and point out what he saw with his painter's eye: figure and ground, shapes and lines and curves, the quality of light, how this color projected and that one receded, why one picture was good and another was less so. I didn't know it then, but I was getting a valuable seminar on composition and how to see. All of it tuition-free.

His present to me for my high school graduation was a 35mm camera, and I've been shooting pictures ever since. In part to earn his approval, I always wanted to be good at it, and that meant paying close attention to fine photographers, something I've been doing for 45 years now. I never tire of looking at great pictures.