Well, who am I? Among other things, I am a Seattle-based photographer, and this blog seems to have morphed from a place where I wrote about technology and design to a pure photoblog of the photos that I wish to highlight for some reason or another. If you are interested in seeing more of my work, click here to see my Flickr photostream. (Also, clicking on the photo in the blog will open that photo in Flickr.)

If you like what you see here and would like to order high-resolution, large prints suitable for framing, click here.

If you are interested in obtaining a license to use my work, click here.

 

My life, with photography

I’ve been doing photography, on and off, more or less, since my first Pentax K1000 film SLR back in the early 80s. I loved — still love — that camera. It’s a little tank of a camera, and almost 100% manual. Everything but the internal light meter must be manually set. So, it is a great learner’s camera because you have to learn some photography basics (such as the relationship between shutter speed, aperture, and depth of field), or your photos will look like crap. The manual settings also slow you down and force you to take your time and really try to see the full potential of the shot before you take it. And, when you do it right, the pictures it takes can be simply magnificent.

Digital photography has its downsides (it’s too easy to simply shoot hundreds of bad pictures, and hope one of them turns out well rather than getting it right in the camera to begin with), but it has opened a whole new world of possibilities for me over the past few years, and I’ve only recently really started giving my photography the level of attention I’ve always meant to.

My philosophy: I love deep rich colors. I love simple lines. I like unusual perspectives on the familiar. To me, photography is about light and color and composition, and there aren’t any real prescriptive rules about what subject you should shoot or what methods are “proper” to use to get the effect you want. I have no problem with spending 5 days processing a multiple exposure photo or 5 minutes processing a single shot, so long as the shot pleases my eye in some way. My only rule is “whatever works,” and whatever pleases my eye rules.

I understand the technical side of photography (and of software photo processing), enough to realize the toolset available to achieve effects I want to achieve, but I find technical discussions of cameras, camera equipment, photo processing software etc. to be generally really quite boring and beside the point. These days the quality of cameras and lenses has advanced to such a point that the differences between brands is almost indistinguishable (at least for SLRs), and I find arguments about Canon vs Nikon vs Pentax vs whatever to be mostly pedantic and uninteresting.

I find HDR, DRI, and tonemapping fascinating, but like to use it as one more method to enhance rather than overwhelm the shot.

And I firmly believe that it is the person behind the camera, and not the camera itself or the software processing that makes the shot. The person’s vision of what the photo should be is all that really matters. Some of my own shots that have pleased me the most were shot with a point-and-shoot. And my digital SLR has certainly captured its share of stinkers.

In any case, that’s a little about me and why I love photography and what drives me to spend so much time and creative energy on my photos.

… and now for all the legal stuff:

All of my pictures on this blog are copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.

You may not use or reproduce the photos in any way without my express permission. If you’d like to use one of my images for any reason, please contact me to obtain permission and licensing information.