About Me

I am Gary Emmerson
astroshack.com
I am an amateur astrophotographer and a health care professional with many years of experience in medical imaging, to include light microscopy, electron microscopy, medical thermography, radiographic, and forensic medical imaging. Since 2015, I mainly do deep sky imaging from an observatory in the Mojave desert in southern California.

For many years I have enjoyed nature, architectural, landscape, underwater, glamour, street, travel, and event photography. I started photography with a simple Kodak 110 when I was a young child. Many years later I graduated to a manual focus medium format view camera, then a 35 mm range finder, then a 35 mm single lens reflex (SLR), then to a digital single lens reflex (DSLR). I also have many years experience in the dark room developing, as well as printing film.

I first attended photography school in 1971. It emphasized photojournalism, studio photography, and darkroom techniques. Later, I studied scientific and medical imaging in graduate schools. I have attended Nikon school and have taken hundreds of hours of master classes in lighting, composition, color, and digital processing, street, event, and glamour (how to work with professional models) photography from professional photographers.

While I have a special passion for black and white photography, especially medium format film, I prefer the economy and convenience of digital photography. All of my deep sky imaging is done with digital cameras with cooled sensors, that are designed for low light astrophotography.

I am a member of Riverside Astronomical Society and have been a site director for our club's dark sky site in the Mojave Desert, where I maintain an observatory.
My Desert Observatory Build
On May 15, 2015, I broke ground to build my observatory in the Mojave Desert. Click the Gallery button to display gallery of my build photos.