So…. I had a little change in my life last Friday.  My company did some reorganizing and I was left on the outside looking in.  In a lot of ways this is a good thing but it still sucks!  So I should have more time to blog about photography and get out and take pictures.  We’ll see since I spent today replacing closet doors in my basement.

Sunday was a beautiful day for taking pictures. Warm, but not too warm. Sunny, but with clouds in the sky. A free day after my wife was away all week and I had our daughter all to myself. The timing was perfect for Jeff Revell’s photowalk in Georgetown.

For those who don’t know what a photowalk is Jeff wrote a pretty good explanation here. In a nutshell it’s a bunch of photographers gathering in a place and taking pictures while walking and socializing. Fun.

This particular walk was in Georgetown and started with us all meeting under the Whitehurst Freeway and then walking along the C&O canal. On the back streets and along the canal there a thousand little details that make great pictures. There were also tourists who were confused by our presence. Was a politician jogging on the trail? Was it a Flickr meetup? I love it when you take a picture and three other people suddenly appear to take the same picture.
Read more

So it’s been a few days since I posted a blog entry but I have a good reason. I was in Tampa at my brother-in-law’s wedding. Everything went incredibly smooth and it was great. I’m not going to go into details here about the wedding but I do want to share a few pictures I took with my Canon Point & Shoot.

One of the stops was a visit to the aquarium with my daughter.

Read more

Last year (2007) I took advantage of our proximity to DC and participated in a Washington Photo Safari’s Workshop for the Cherry Blossoms at dawn. I arrived early on a very COLD morning and had a chance to wander the monuments of DC before dawn. There’s something very quiet and serene at that time. It came through in the photos.

The workshop ended up being a good education during which I didn’t get any good pictures of the blossoms. The problem was that peak flowers passed very suddenly and right before the workshop. The trees had flowers but they were not the best.  Regardless I enjoyed the morning.

Read more

Part of the reason I started this blog was to post my pictures and tell the stories behind them. This is the first of I hope many such postings.

In September 2004 my wife and I took a trip through southern Utah and northern Arizona. We started in Las Vegas and drove to Grand Junction, CO. But we didn’t go straight, we visited places that are just incredible. We hiked down a slot canyon into Zion National Park, visited Bryce Canyon, drove through the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, saw the Grand Canyon north rim, boated on Lake Powell, gaped at Monument Valley, Canyonlands and Arches National Park. It was quite the trip and I took photos the entire time.

See all my postings about this trip

Near the end of the trip my wife just wanted a day to sleep in and I wanted to shoot at sunrise. So she stayed in Moab while I went to Mesa Arch. We had gone out the previous morning with a local photographer but I wasn’t satisfied with the pictures (I’m still not). A comment to professionals who may read this posting, just because you’re bored going to the same places all the time for sunrise, your clients may have never been there and deserve the best spot. Other than his choice of sunrise location he was a wonderful guide.

But let’s get back to my story.

Read more

The galleries from the old design are now working. While I am going to continue improving them they are already better than on the old web site. Read more

Those of you who followed AginPhotography in the old design know that updates have been few and far between. I had no way of telling stories or making small updates. By adding this blog I am able to add postings in a very small amount of time. Some will be about photos I have taken, others will be my thoughts on different aspects of photography. Still others will have a personal nature although I plan to create a separate website for that. All will be from the perspective of the photography amateur.

As I add to this blog I will be balancing many priorities for my time and the picture above shows two of the biggest. My daughter and wife. Given everything else in life I am aiming to average at least one post per week. Some weeks will be more and some less. As long as this blog provides me an avenue to show my photos and tell my stories I’ll be happy.

I started my web site primarily to display some galleries of photos I have taken over the years. Using Adobe Lightroom made it very easy to create the galleries but required me to make large galleries with multiple photos. I realized I wanted a way to post small numbers of photos. A blog made sense.

I quickly decided that I could use WordPress to build the blog. As I started using WordPress I realized that it should be the engine for my entire web site, hence a complete redesign within 24 hours.

As you will notice the galleries are not yet working. I need to experiment with the best way of embedding a Web Gallery from Lightroom within WordPress. Any ideas would be welcome.

One feature I’m looking forward to having used is the comments. Please use them so I know that someone is looking at my website.

Life is too short to be running from home to work to home to work…

We all need a way to express ourselves and capture the beauty
in our lives, I channel these efforts through a camera lens.