About

I’m Brian Morris, an amateur photographer in Wilmington, NC. I love photography. I love to take pictures, and I love viewing good photography done by others. I like photographing the local scenery, especially the downtown area. I’ve been taking pictures for about thirty years. Currently, I’m using a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi for most of the photos you’ll see on this website.

I created Altered Lens to display the best of my own photography and also well done photo galleries that I happen to come across on the web.

I’m also a guitar player, electronics tinkerer and website admin for a music forum called The FLipside. And I work for Granite Services as a reactor services tech. Which is a fancy way of saying I dangle a camera inside a nuclear reactor and look for cracks.

I’ve been taking photos since I was about eight years old, when I received a cheap 110 camera for my birthday. Yep, that’s right – 110 film, magicube flash, manual film advance, etc. I think even the lens was plastic. The camera came with a little book that explained a few basic techniques, like the rule of thirds and focal lengths, but the one thing it said that I remember most of all is this: take lots of pictures of your subject. Try it from every angle, every distance, don’t be afraid to experiment. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since – taking lots of pictures.

Now, being a kid, I wasn’t able to experiment to my hearts content. The reasons being that one, film was expensive to buy and two, film was expensive to develop and three, I had no money. Mom and Dad controlled that aspect. When I grew up though, I joined the US Navy and gained a slight bit of financial independence and I bought my first real camera, a Canon EOS Rebel. It was a 35mm film camera, and it was the most awesome tool I’d ever held in my hand at that point. I was pretty blessed back then because I was ordered to sail in the Mediterranean, and I hit all sorts of places like Abu Dabi, Italy, France, Spain, Greece, Turkey, etc. Everywhere I went I had that camera in hand. I managed to take pictures in so many exotic (to me) locations that I really had to buckle down and learn the art of photography in order to get it right the first time. Because with film photography, it’s all about getting it right the first time.

That camera is long gone (it was stolen from the trunk of my car) but I’ve had a Rebel in one form or another ever since then. Currently I use a Digital Rebel XSi, and it is fantastic for my purposes. I’ve been photographing with it since October 2008, and I hope to still be using it for a very long time.

When I got out of the Navy, I came back home to beautiful Wilmington, NC, quite a picturesque town. If you look through my gallery, you’ll see many shots of the downtown area of Wilmington, and the surrounding area is quite beautiful too – Southport, Fort Fisher and the wilds of Brunswick county are a few of the outlying areas that offer fantastic photo opportunities.

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