That picture-taking gene wasn't even just on his father's side.  "When I was growing up in Gainesville, Fla., my mom and dad were both photographers," Johnston relates. "When I was 5, my mom would have me stand on a box and help her in the darkroom."

Dad had tried to fight off the family trait by becoming an Air Force pilot and then putting himself through med school at the University of Florida. To make a living during that time, Sam III and wife Carolyn opened a photo studio next door to their home. The business thrived, Carolyn made portraits a specialty, and Sam III left medicine behind --  though "to this day," Johnston says, "he still photographs the med-school students." Carolyn, who'd begun adding paint to her portraits for a mixed-media effect, gradually began making them more and more painterly, and after 18 years segued from photography to doing oil portraits on canvas; she's since become the de facto official portrait artist of the University of Florida administration. "Just about every hall in the University of Florida has some painting of hers," her son says proudly.

At Gainesville High School, across the street from his house, Johnston shoot yearbook photos to earn his English grade – this, at the insightful urging of his teacher, who didn't know why Sam had trouble reading but knew it wasn't because he was slow or wasn't trying. "I'm dyslexic," Johnston later discovered. But, under this arrangement, he passed his class with flying colors – or black-and-whites, actually.

In 10th grade, Johnston began apprenticing under his father. "He had me doing 4x5 transparency work, both black-and-white and color, mostly of the commercial work he was shooting. I had to print and process, and it was funny: He said, 'I'll show you one time. After that you go get a book.' So I listened! I hated to read, because of the dyslexia."

Johnston attended the well-regarded photography program at Daytona Beach Community College, entering directly into second-semester classes on the strength of his portfolio and the technical knowledge he'd acquired at home. The Adams workshop came during this time. But for all that, after graduation, he couldn't find work because he was good in too many areas. Or, well, that wasn't the problem per se – it was not knowing how to sell his specialties.

"When I got out of college, I went to Tampa tried to get accounts.  I went to all the big ad agencies, and all of them asked what I specialized in. And I'd look at 'em dumbfounded and said, 'Photography!'" He laughs. "What's the difference between photographing a person or a building of a product? I was freaking out and not getting any jobs or making money for the first three months. Now, years later, I get ad work from big agencies because now when they ask that question I tell 'em what they want to hear!"

Johnston, whose pianist wife Deanna works for the Florida Orchestra, in administration, started Studio 4 Design in 1983, originally in Claremont, Fla., outside Orlando. He relocated to Tampa after a year, and remains one of the state's top photographers. As a sideline, he taught himself the difficult craft of Macromedia Flash production and now builds Web sites as slick and glossy as any of his advertising work, for variety of clients that even include other photographers.



Bio originally written by Frank Lovece for Panasonic Digital Photo Academy