I got my start in photography by being a bad boy. I was in junior high and running with the wrong kids. I grew up in an Air Force family and my parents ordered me to get a hobby and took me to the hobby shops on base. Of course, I didn't like any of them so my dad picked the photo shop. The photo shop had cameras, a studio with lights, a 6 person darkroom and everything was free except film. The Airmen took me with them into the desert to shoot landscapes.
I decided to study photography for 2 1/2 years at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara CA. It was brutal, but well worth it. When I graduated Uncle Sam was waiting, with open arms, and somehow I was a U.S. Army photographer with a top secret clearance shooting for a group that was called the Manhattan Project in the 1940s. When I left the Army I decided to work for the government and I worked in the Pentagon, Dept. of the Interior and USDA. I was honored to be able to photograph two presidents in the White House, President Nixon and President Ford.
USDA sent me to Vermont on a shoot and that was life changing. I totally fell in love with the state and it's people. Vermont is an amazing little state. Everywhere you look there is beauty and the people keep it that way. I have lived here since 1977 and I still feel the same way. I appreciate Vermont so much because I grew up in a very beautiful area of the country in the 50s, but it has changed, for the worst, over the years and I could never live there today. What we are doing to the earth makes me very sad and that is what motivates me to make photographs, to show people what we have and hopefully they will appreciate it and protect it.
George Robinson joined Pixels.com Licensing on April 6th, 2010.
