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Bill Atkinson: Photography as a Second Career

02 March 2008
Published in Landscape Photography

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...