Well here I am in all my colorblind glory. I look pretty normal, don’t I? (I hope )

Vital stats as of the last time I checked this page:

Age:27
Height: 5’7″
Weight: 130lbs
Employment: Procter and Gamble, Baby Care Upstream Technology
Education: Masters of Biochemistry, Ohio University
Hobbies: Backpacking, broomball, photography, computer games

I’ve always been fascinated with how color works, but I didn’t discover that I was colorblind until highschool – up until then I just assumed that everybody thought red and green were similar colors, and that it was normal to have clothes that mysteriously “changed color” throughout the day. I’m red-green colorblind, a condition that affects something like 30% of males to varying degrees. It’s certainly not debilitating, but it does provide a very unique perspective on the world around us.

I’ve also been fascinated with photography for as long as I can remember. Not that I had any obvious aptitude for it – the several hundred snapshots from my Transformers 110mm camera that I used as a kid are frequently unintelligible. Nowdays I just blame that on pushing the limits of my camera’s capabilities . . . but to be honest I just didn’t understand why film never captured things quite the same way I saw them. A lot of professional photographers don’t really understand that either, they just “know” how to make a shot work. I’m too analytical for all that though

I recently had the opportunity to spend almost a year of my career working in the area of color management and artwork optimization. And I’m not talking sitting at the side of a commercial printing press pulling levers to make the colors match the designers’ request (though there was certainly some of that involved!). I mean working on ways to develop and control artwork from the point of creation to fit within the bounds of printing technology . . . and to predict the differences between 0:) (good) and (bad) artwork. In the process I learned more than any person should ever know about images, color, the human vision system, perception, design, printing, and yes photography. And you thought I was just a boring biochemist with a camera!