E.J. Peiker, Nature Photographer

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Greetings and thank you for checking out www.EJPhoto.com.  This is a short autobiography.  My name is E.J. Peiker and I was born in 1960 in Augsburg, Germany in the German state of Bavaria near the Alps.  My family moved to Mansfield, Ohio, in 1969 right before my 9th birthday.  I became a citizen of the United States of America in 1975.  I lived in Ohio until 1979 when I began attending Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.  My original goal was to attend the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs but after my distance vision deteriorated late in high school which precluded me from becoming an Air Force Pilot, I followed plan B which was set in motion when I inherited my grandfathers electronics workbench several years earlier.  At Purdue, I earned a Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering and also completed graduate studies in Microelectronics and Semiconductor Physics.  For more than 26 years, I have worked for the Intel Corporation in California, New Mexico, Oregon, and Arizona where I have engaged in the production of the microprocessors, chip-sets, and communication chips that power modern Personal Computers, Workstations, File Servers, Super Computers and the Internet.  Since 1994, I have lived in the south-central Arizona city of Chandler, a suburb southeast of Phoenix in the Sonoran Desert.  I have two sons, Nicholas (19) and Gregory (14).   Nick is currently attending Arizona State University in Tempe and is in a Finance program.  I am also a professional freelance Nature Photographer and have formally studied photography at the University of New Mexico, the Rocky Mountain School of Photography, and participated in photography seminars and workshops led by several renowned photographers including John Shaw, Arthur Morris, John and Barbara Gerlach, Charles Glatzer and the Nikon Corporation. 

I received my first camera at age 7 - a now defunct 126, square-format, Kodak Instamatic.  At age 12, I started to take pictures more seriously using a Yashica 35mm rangefinder with a 50mm f1.7 lens.  At age 16 I switched to Minolta cameras starting with the professional level XD-11 SLR and then progressing through the Minolta system ultimately ending up with the Minolta Maxxum 9000, the first pro-featured auto-focus SLR, in the late 1980's.  In 1990, I suffered a serious skiing injury that was diagnosed as one that would prevent me from walking again due to the extensiveness of the damage to my left femur, thigh muscles, hip, and knee.  When it looked like I may not walk again, I decided to sell all of my Minolta equipment.  Determination, resolve and many months of  physical therapy resulted in a full recovery after several surgeries 3 1/2 years later.  During my recovery years, I got my drive and determination from aviation earning Private Pilot, Instrument Pilot, Multi-engine Pilot and Commercial Pilot certificates.  I also became heavily involved in advanced flight simulation as pilot training aids and started writing articles about them for aviation magazines.  This gave me the opportunity to log time in American Airline's full motion flight simulators where I learned to fly a Boeing 727.  I have owned both single engine and multi-engine airplanes in the past but do not own an aircraft at present.

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