Tom Pickering, APSA

I'm a 70-something, born-again, computer geek, photographer, musician and one-time sword fight choreographer. I live & work (though now semi-retired) at web development and photography in Belleville, IL.

I've been capturing images, still & movie/video, for nearly 60 years now. I entered a dark room for the first time at age 13 and have been fascinated with the art of photography ever since. My first cameras were Kodak's - a Brownie and an 8mm movie camera. At the dawn of the digital photography age, I switched to digital and never looked back at film. I transitioned into professional photography in 2006, specializing in portraits, commercial and weddings, though I've since stopped shooting weddings to reduce stress.

Today, I am mainly a Nikon shooter, though I have been using my smartphone more and more. For lenses, I use a Tamron 60mm Macro, Laowa 25mm Ultra Macro, Nikkor 18-200mm, Tokina 100-400mm, Tamron 200-500mm, & Nikkor 50mm 1.8.

I use Adobe Bridge for the organization of my images, jumping into Affinity Photo, Photoshop CC, On1 Photo Raw 2024, Topaz Studio, Luminar Neo, and others. Though I aim for everything right in the camera, I shoot RAW (& JPEG), so will always apply post-processing to some extent to all my images, especially my more artistic endeavors.

Formerly a vice president of the Quad Cities Photography Club, I have also served as a competition judge and projectionist there, as well as teaching various Photoshop skills. I am now the PSA Director of Study Groups, a judge for various PSA clubs & councils, and an instructor of PSA's Intro to Photoshop course and PSA's Macro Photography Mentor. I am the developer and webmaster of the PSA PID Digital Dialogue Study Group website, the PSA PTD Image Discussion Groups website, the PSA PJD Image Discussion Groups website, and the PSA ND Image Discussion Groups website, as well as one of the administrators and a participant in several of the groups.

You can see my work on: SmugMug