Member Bios
Group Admin
Brenda Fishbaugh, QPSA
I'm Brenda Fishbaugh. I'm 65 years old and live in Fort Wayne, Indiana half the year and half the year in Sebring, FL. My husband got me a used Canon in 2010 for a trip to Africa, so I'm kind of new to this (and have upgraded three times since then!).
I just retired from running an international business, so photography is a hobby. I am competing in some PSA International competitions and have 3 second stars.
I'm looking to improve and really want critique. I wanted a General Digital Dialogue...so we started a new group and I'm suddenly Admin! It's my first time, always open for suggestions!
Jim Hagan, MPSA
I grew up in Chicago and went to nearby Northwestern University where I received an MBA degree in 1963. Most of my working career was in accounting and finance. I joined the PSA around 1965 but with the demands of my occupation and family, I soon dropped out of PSA and took few photos over the next 30 years.
I retired in 1999, moved to Toledo Ohio and joined several local camera clubs. I was amazed at the changes in photography in the last 30 years - digital imaging, automatic focusing, automatic exposure, automatic bracketing, and higher ISO’s. I felt like Rip Van Winkle who slept for 20 years and awoke to a new world.
After being retired for 17 years I had accumulated many photos and after a forty-year hiatus, I rejoined the PSA in 2017. My membership in the PSA has been a wonderful experience. I enjoy entering photos in numerous exhibitions throughout the world where I can share my images as well as see images of fellow photographers from around the world. I also belong to three PSA study groups and enjoy discussing my photos as well as those of others in the groups. Study groups have been an enjoyable learning process.
I am now in my mid 80’s with some physical limitations so travel and photo outings are now more limited. But, entering photos in exhibitions and belonging to study groups has been a wonderful pastime and learning experience.
Sunil Mehta
A native of Bombay, India - my tryst with photography dates back to the early 1980s. Teaming up with a group of enthusiasts in the Photographic Society of India I had a very curious spell watching the skills of the stalwarts of that era and beyond.
Armed with a diploma in Industrial electronics and a diploma in photography the obvious choice was to be identified with a photofinishing enterprise of that period so that I could get a firsthand experience how the automated machines performed and eventually how the photographic darkrooms graduated to the industry parenthesis and a ringside view of the other side of the coin namely, printing. The stint in India was a very fruitful one that lasted for a decade and a half before I moved to the Republic of Congo to be associated with one of the majors in the industry namely Fujifilm, Central/Western- Africa as the technical manager also in charge of the operations. I wound up my contract with Fuji after a fulfilling association of 23 years.
Though I had the fortune to experience all the majors, Leica has been close to the chest, literally and a couple of them (the Leica Q and Leica SL) travel with me all the time. I am keenly interested in the happenings on the street and during travel. The preferred mode of exposition is in Black and White.
I currently reside in Lewisville Texas, and member of the Dallas Camera Club.
My personal website is: http://www.sunilmehta.photography
James Troeger
Originally a native "Michigander," I also lived in the Orlando, FL, Tampa/St. Pete, FL, and Asheville, NC areas prior to calling the Upstate area of South Carolina home. My professional career has been spent in the areas of manufacturing and microelectronics with a heavy focus in engineering and quality roles.
My interest in photography kind of goes back as far as I can remember, having received a wide variety of cameras as gifts through the years, starting with my 10th birthday. I took a photography class in high school, which included a darkroom element, and subsequently helped me land a co-op position during my junior and senior years with a photography studio in my hometown. During that time, I served as the studio's primary black & white darkroom technician, primarily focused on developing medium format film, creating high-quality portraiture prints as large as 24" x 36" and also sepia-toned prints that were subsequently colorized by hand using watercolor and/or pencils by our in-studio colorization artist.
I have also been a member of a couple different camera clubs over the years and currently maintain association with the Camera Club of Hendersonville, where I also serve as their webmaster. Despite my interest in photography, involvement with clubs, and even former darkroom experience, I have never really taken my craft seriously from the perspective of really striving to understand why one photo might move me more than another, what makes a good photo, how to improve a photo, etc. I am now at a point where I do want to take it more seriously and I want to learn, thus my recent decision to join PSA and the opportunity to join in and participate with a Digital Dialogue group.
I look forward to the opportunity to learn with and from everyone who is on this journey!
Pei-Fan Mu
I live in Taiwan and as a teacher at a University. My major is in nursing and focusing on oncology nursing, long-term care, pediatric nursing and depressive art therapy for graduated program. Especially, I love ethnography and phenomenology. I got my MS and PhD from University of Minnesota on 1993. I love travel and take photos. I enjoy to watch the birds, and animal life style, their interaction and relationships. Also I
would like to learn more about the beauty of photography in regarding the unique and different way of seeing the world, the beauty of life. Currently, I belong to the photographic society of Taiwan since 2019.
Robert Schleif
I am a professor of Biology and Biophysics at Johns Hopkins University. Despite never having displayed significant artistic abilities, I have always been sufficiently interested in art and design to have worked on my own at developing my limited abilities. Thus, I did some photography as a youngster, did more during my post doctoral studies, then turned to graphics and learned Adobe Illustrator so that I could draw all the figures for two of my books, both of which I designed (consulting with the publishers' artists). As I'm not now writing a book and also no longer have a need to design and build our household furniture, my artistic creative urges are currently being satisfied with trying to improve my photography. When I returned to photography, about five years ago, I spent a year or so learning the technical aspects. Now, most of my effort goes into the artistic aspects. Contrary to my maxim of trying to use the best tools, I do not use Adobe Photoshop. I happened to have gotten started using a program called Picture Window Pro, which is very powerful, and operates at a rather fundamental level.
Ed Ogle
I grew up in the mountain resort town of Gatlinburg, Tennessee which is just outside the Great Smokey Mountains National Park. My parents worked for the park service so I grew up mostly in the forest there. I spent my career working in high tech research and development. I moved to Colorado from Tennessee in 1984 and these two states are the only places I have lived. I currently live in Loveland, CO and am a member of the Loveland Photographic Society which is a PSA sponsor.
I developed an interest in photography around age 11 and have maintained that interest off and on all throughout my life. Because of my connection to the National Park Service, I was exposed to lots of photography early on. Around the time Covid 19 started (2020) I made the decision to join the two local camera clubs, Loveland Photographic Society and Fort Collins Digital Camera Club, because they were meeting on-line. Before that I really didn’t interact with other photographers.
My wife and I are still very active and when our various age-related afflictions are under control, we spend a lot of time climbing and skiing in the Colorado Rockies. I am also very interested in botany, biology and astronomy. I am a member of the Colorado Native Plant Society. Wildflowers, mountain landscapes and night sky photography are common subjects of my work.