Tom grew up in a family of very good amateur photographers. His father Gene was in the Navy and later the insurance business and loved taking photographs. Tom's family had a black & white darkroom in their house and while growing up he would develope his own film and then do his own printing. Yup the old fashioned way with an enlarger and trays of chemistry. He was given his first camera when he was three years old. He had lots of fun taking photos while growing up, but it was in college that he started making some money with his camera.

While in art school, the other students needed slides of their art to enter juried shows and to include with their applications to graduate school. In 1975 Tom started graduate school in Madison to study sculpture. While working on his art, he was a regular winner of call in contests at a local radio station, WISM-AM. WISM was the official concert station in Madison. Winning concert tickets was a regular occurrence and that led to photographing the concerts and eventually doing all the backstage photography for WISM radio. Tom worked closely with Charlie Simon and Jonathan W. Little of WISM in photographing them with visiting artists and the artists with contest winners.

All this led to Tom becoming a staff photographer on several Madison, Wisconsin based music publications. As a result, Tom enjoyed access to about 70 concerts per year. With backstage passes that permitted access to photographing the concerts from prime locations, to doing posed photographs for the covers of the publications, Tom was able to capture some amazing photographs of the top individuals and groups of that era.
Tom also had his photograph taken with many of the artists. Here are a few of Tom back when he had dark hair. His hair is considerably lighter (white) now, but at least he still has been able to keep it.

Part of Tom's art training was in graphic design and he put it to use in designing many of the T-shirts for WISM radio. He is wearing several of them in these photographs.

After all the concerts and leaving graduate school, Tom moved back to Eau Claire with is wife Nancy and their young daughter. After about two years, they had the opportunity to buy a portrait studio in Eau Claire. Tom has owned the studio for 29 years.

Tom loves to photograph people and doing photography while traveling to conventions and on vacations. But none of that matches the exciting times of photographing at concerts in the late 70's and early 80's.

Enjoy our site and we hope you will give us your feedback on what we have to offer, the ease of the site to get around and if we answered your questions. Of course, if you don't find a band or artist on the site that you are interested in, we want to know that too. If we photographed them, we will add them to the site.

Enjoy the show!

Check back, we will likely add some more photos of Tom with other artists.

Tom's portrait studio is his main business focus. If you would like to take a look at his studio website, click below:

www.gilesphoto.com