Christian Frederick "Chris" Gulker (March 10, 1951 – October 27, 2010) was an American photographer, programmer, writer, and pioneer in electronic publishing. A "Silicon Valley pioneer," Gulker was "instrumental in introducing the digital publishing era to the newspaper industry" and was a central figure in the early history of blogging. Early years Born in New York City, Gulker grew up on the shores of Lake Erie near Erie, Pennsylvania. He was a 1969 graduate of Western Reserve Academy of Hudson, Ohio, and an alumnus of Occidental College, Los Angeles, where he earned a degree in Comparative literature. He worked as a dishwasher, cab driver, tow truck operator and barman before he was hired in 1978 as a staff photographer at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, where the photography department came to view him as "one of its brightest stars." He also worked as a freelancer, and has been published in Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Glamour and The New York Times and was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Gulker contributed to the National Press Photographers Association's Electronic Photojournalism Workshop. San Francisco Examiner Gulker moved to Menlo Park, CA, after the Herald-Examiner closed in 1989, and joined the San Francisco Examiner, where he initially served as picture editor and led the photography staff's transition from film to digital cameras. His work made possible an all-Macintosh-produced edition of The Examiner after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake led to a power shutdown that idled the newspaper's publishing system. Turning the Examiner into a "digital laboratory," he converted the newspaper from black and white to color by implementing a production system of his own design that used Macintoshes to do color separations and made The Examiner the first major American daily to switch to full-color production using desktop technology, with the first colored front page printed in January 1990. Gulker's "'hacked-together' color calibration system allowed the Examiner to incorporate color for less than it cost other papers," making him "a leader in developing in-house capabilities to use color electronic images daily on deadline." Gulker's work, which redefined "the state of the art in editorial production methods among print-on-paper media," was driven by necessity. The Examiner, having recently switched from on-site letterpress equipment to a new flexographic press, wanted to use the new printing plant's color capability. However, under the joint operating agreement between the Examiner and its local rival, the San Francisco Chronicle,