I am John Ruttenberg, age 56. I have been married for 26 years and have three children: Max, 16; Robert; 19; and Janet, 21. I live just outside Boston in Newton, Massachusetts, and also have a summer house in Nantucket. I have a 9 month old Labrador Retriever puppy.

I am a computer engineer. I went to graduate school at Yale in computer science and worked at a number of computer systems companies, most notably Silicon Graphics in the ‘90s.

Right now I’m at a crossroad in my life. I’m going to devote the next year to photography.

I have been an avid photographer all my life. My dad had a darkroom and taught me how to develop black and white film and make enlargements. I pursued photography in high school and college; but once I left college, I didn’t have a dark room and lost interest for a while. Of course, when my first child was born, I regained this interest. As digital photography took off, I discovered that I didn’t need an actual darkroom in order to do all my own post processing.

About eight years ago, I bought my first serious color printer, an Epson 1200. But when I started to use it, I was very disappointed. The color of my prints was subtly but obviously wrong and I had no idea what to do about it. After a little online searching, I discovered Dan Margulis’ Professional Photoshop. It was tough going at first, but I did manage to figure out why my prints looked wrong and started to learn what to do about it.

Since then, I’ve taken 3 classes with Dan, led a couple of dgrin book groups to read his books, been a beta reader for Professional Photoshop, Fith Edition, and become a moderator of his online yahoo group, Advanced Color Theory. So I suppose you could say I’m kind of his disciple when it comes to digital post processing.

To be honest, I have all the stuff I need. I have a Canon 5D and 1DmkIII. I have zooms and primes. Of course I have computers and an Epson R4000 printer. I’d like to answer a different question: What is my favorite stuff? What do I use all the time?

I have become a serious ballet photographer, and for shooting in the theater under theater lights, I always shoot with two bodies, one with an 85mm f/1.2 and the other with a 135mm f/2.0. On a 5D, even 85mm is pretty wide for this particular subject. Ballet is often dimly lit and I find that these fast primes on cameras with good low noise performance lets me get shots which almost no one else can.

For other photography, I most often use either my 50mm f/1.4 or 24-105mm IS. These are the lenses I travel with. On special occasions, I’ll use something else, but this is what I use almost all the time.

As I just mentioned, I’ve become a devoted ballet photographer. I have a contract with Boston Ballet which allows me to shoot both dress and studio rehearsals. The contract also stipulates that I can’t make any money from the shots, but this doesn’t especially distinguish me from anyone else involved with ballet, so I don’t feel bad about it.

Ballet and photography have a magic symbiosis. While live dance is ephemeral and dancers' careers are short, photography can capture and preserve ballet like no other art form. In this medium, ephemeral moments can become immortal. Photography can also aid in the production of ballet by showing both imperfections and great moments.

Tai Jimenez in Balanchine's 'Serenade,' 2006

Beyond this, ballet is a very special subject. Everyone involved, the dancers, the artistic staff, the lighting, costume, and set designers spend a lifetime learning how to present beautiful and dramatic moments. The dancers in particular have to be both world-class athletes and also classical artists.

After ballet, I love to use my camera as a gateway to adventure. I’ll keep track of upcoming local events and go "cover" them as an amateur photojournalist. Of course, travel always helps one to see anew. And when it can happen, portraits can be very rewarding. By "when it can happen" I mean that it’s easy to overuse your welcome in shoot friends and family members. I’ve found that I need to ration this privilege.

Cartier-Bresson, Avedon, Leibovitz, of course. I especially love Cartier-Bresson’s Indian photography, which is not what he is most widely known for. His shots of Gandhi’s funeral and of the time of partition are amazing photojournalism as well as fine art in and of themselves. Now there is a high degree of difficulty. You get one shot ever to capture the first flame on Gandhi’s funeral with Nehru in the despair in the background.

Closer to home, Costas who was Balanchine's photographer came to shoot a Boston Ballet production of Les Noces and Serenade a couple of years ago. I learned a huge amount about ballet photography from him. He is the only other photographer I’ve ever seen shoot ballet with the 135mm f/2.0. I was doing it before I met him, but he had been doing if for 30 years, mostly on film cameras.

Some pearls of wisdom from Costas:

1. Only show them your best stuff. In particular, look long and hard at the dancers and throw out the shots where their form isn’t perfect.
2. Don’t move around during the performance or rehearsal. It only decreases the likelihood you will get the shots you want and annoys the company.
3. Shoot off center make your shots more dynamic.
4. Sacrifice depth of field and perfect exposure to get fast shutter speeds to capture motion.

Jeez, a long time. When did it start? Ask Don and Chris. I wasn’t the first customer by far, but I was a very early problem customer, always asking for stuff they didn’t have. I wanted user-defined categories. I wanted an API for automated bulk uploads. I probably introduced them to Dan Margulis’ work. When they started dgrin, they notified me and I joined pretty quickly

Before I started to use SmugMug, I hosted my own server and used my own software to present my shots. This was workable, but not pretty. The first thing that attracted me to SmugMug was good looking presentation without a lot of work on my part. Since then I’ve also gotten a lot from its pro features which allow me to sell prints without having to make them myself. I’ve done some customization and this gotten better and easier with time. The SmugMug communities have also been a gas.

Helped me get my shots out there. Helped me put my best face forward. Together with dgrin, helped me find an audience and community and make up for the formal photography training I never got.

This is a hard one. I’m good at giving a lot of advice, but not so good at being terse. I do tell a lot of people I meet that they should tune into dgrin. There are other online photographic communities, but I think dgrin is the best place to get going. The atmosphere is mostly friendly and helpful. Beginners get a lot of good advice and useful critique. People look beyond initial technical limitations and try to help each other get the shots they really wanted. As I said above, it can help make up for a lack of formal training.