A look at a professional who reached the top of his industry before switching gears to lead a new life behind a camera lens.

Rob Kurtzman, a forensic pathologist living in Grand Junction, Colo., has been practicing for more than 20 years. But in college, "it was tough deciding between photography or going to medical school," he says.

He was introduced to photography by his cousin, and received his first camera when he was 8 years old. "It was a Kodak Hawkeye, and it used 127 rollfilm," Kurtzman remembers. "I developed my first roll of film in our basement at home using an FR developing kit. It came with a daylight developing tank, three 5x7 developing trays, a contact print box, a few chemicals, a safelight and some paper tongs for the trays. I was hooked.

From then on, it seemed that I always had a camera...

A look at a professional who reached the top of his industry before switching gears to lead a new life behind a camera lens.

When he was first introduced to photography, taking a picture was something just short of miraculous to Jim Dines. "As a child, I was fascinated that I could reproduce an image," he says. This philosophy made him see each photograph as a one-of-a-kind slice of life.

Dines grew up in picturesque San Francisco and started out thinking of photography as his first career choice. "I had a hard time making money at it, so I had to develop a new career," he says. "If there were enough money in it, I would have been a full-time photographer."

Instead, he developed a very successful career as a financial analyst. He still publishes a financial newsletter, The Dines Letter, but his love...

A look at a professional who reached the top of his industry before switching gears to lead a new life behind a camera lens.

Stuart Green is not ready to give up his day job as an orthopedic surgeon just yet. In the meantime, however, he's content to have dual careers as a surgeon and a photographer. After all, his interest in photography preceded his career as a physician.

"My father had a darkroom in our house when I was growing up," says Green. "I started developing pictures when I was six years old." He even processed his own film for many years, starting with Anscochrome, a transparency film from the 1950s. He later used E-6 processing and now works with digital photography.

In his medical practice, Green has authored or contributed to 15 books and more than a hundred...

A look at a professional who reached the top of his industry before switching gears to lead a new life behind a camera lens.

Photography opened a whole new avenue of learning and excitement for me," says Hal Eastman, a prominent businessman who divides his time between Boise, Idaho, and Carmel, Calif.

Eastman graduated from Stanford Business School and enjoyed a long, diverse career as an executive in various industries before retiring to devote most of his time to photography. "Eighty percent of what I do now is photography," he says. "I'm doing projects that I really care about."

After working hard as an executive through his mid-40s, Eastman says, he decided that he wanted to do and be something different. "I had in mind that I wanted to explore the artistic part of life instead of business at that point," he says. "At first I didn't think of photography as an art...

A look at a professional who reached the top of his industry before switching gears to lead a new life behind a camera lens.

One of the most successful examples of the dual-career trend is Bill Atkinson, a businessman and photographer.

"When I was 10 years old, my mother gave me a subscription to Arizona Highways magazine," Atkinson recalls. "I cut out several nature photographs and displayed them on my bedroom walls. I found that each day I viewed them, I felt nourished and inspired."

Those photographs inspired a lifelong passion for photography, even though Atkinson has had an illustrious business career.

He was one of the architects of many of Apple Computer's early software products. During the 1980s, he was the main designer for the Lisa computer, which preceded the Macintosh, and he wrote the MacPaint and QuickDraw graphics primitives on which every Macintosh system was built...

When Seattle-based photographers Michele Westmorland and Karen Huntt set foot in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, they noticed something strange.

"This white dog ran past me, looking at first like he was covered in blood," says Huntt. "I was a bit alarmed and turned to walk after him when it dawned on me that the reason he had big red stains all over him was from people spitting betel-nut juice all over him. People weren't spitting at him on purpose — there's just so much spitting going on that the poor hound had crossed paths with a few too many chewers."

This first encounter with copious amounts...