One of the coolest gifts my parents ever gave me was my first camera, a Polaroid Swinger. (If you haven’t heard of the Swinger, all you need to do is watch this commercial to know when it was popular!). I appear stiff and lifeless, some might say ridiculous, in photos, but absolutely love making pictures. [...]

For 17 years I’ve been married to a wonderful man. Along with the marriage came some bonus kids, a house with no mortgage and innumerable other gifts. The yang to that yin is that we live next door to a very dilapidated, smelly mobile home. About ten years ago it was hauled away, only to [...]

Well, it stinks that my blog has been off line most of the day due to a server issue. Too bad I earlier spent lots of time visiting other great blogs and leaving comments with links back here, which will never be accessed by potential visitors due to loonnnnngggg load times and outright “file not [...]

If you are an SLR person, you likely have a few or more lenses and other camera paraphernalia. When you travel, even just across town for an assignment or a purely creative photography expedition, you want to have your camera handy and protected. I’ve been hauling a great Canon bag around for years, but before [...]

What a difference! Above is the image I used originally in one of my “What’s on My Needles” posts a couple of months ago. Below is a corrected image based on tips found at Digital Photography School. It seems counter intuitive to some people to select “unsharpen” when the outcome they desire is one of [...]

I remember when a VA colleague of mine announced that her office was going paperless. That was in 2004, when I was tired of running spyware and virus programs everytime I turned around. Paperless wasn’t a goal of mine, but becoming a PC-less office was. Whew! Am I glad I am all Mac these days. [...]

When the world gets confusing it is wise to go to a sacred and safe place. Yesterday felt like one of those days, so Chester and I headed out to the rookery on the edge of Willow Lake here in Prescott. Great blue herons and cormorants are nesting there now. This place is lively and [...]

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I wrote a few months ago about the great wealth of “Digital Asset Management” to be found in Peter Krogh’s excellent book, The Dam Book. Now that I have spent a few months using his process of preparing images for storage and retrieval, I was ready to take a second look at what cataloging software [...]

Paddling With a Camera is a blog I just discovered thanks to ProBloggers recent Group Writing Project. I was zipping around in Marek Uliasz’s site, initially psyched at having found a blog devoted to two of my favorite out-of-office activities. That would be, clearly, paddling my kayak and photography. Then I found the part about [...]

A few years ago my friend Susy and I began creating blank notecards under the name Gate Ways. I took black & white photographs of gates in wilderness areas around Prescott when we were out hiking. I printed the photos in my darkroom and and then made cards of images. We both got busy with [...]