Category: Travel

Since the only things to photograph here while under house arrest were what I could find in my yard, it was pretty much cats and lizards. So I decided to grab some older photographs for a little variety.

Many of these were taken with my old trusty D70. Extremely modest gear, compared to the current generation of digital cameras, but it’s what I had at the time. Like the old photojournalist’s credo “F8 and be there” it’s more important to take a picture than to take the most technically perfect picture ever.

Some were taken with my 7100, which was wonderful in its day, but on my trips to Taiwan and Italy I carried an 18-200 lens that I never bonded with. Just couldn’t make sharp images to save my life though it’s tack sharp with a 35mm 1.8 or even the 18-120 that camera wore as a walkin’ around lens after I sold the 18-200.

So, soon I’ll be adding some portfolios to prove that I don’t just take pictures of cats. And some pictures of cats.

Let’s begin with dogs. First, some photos of a young and handsome Shadow.

And Chopper and Cookie, plus bonus pics of a little smash faced yorkie who lived with a friend a decade ago.

There are occasionally photographs of actual people, too. Though that’s rare. Not much of a people person.

It’s always interesting to see what you get from a sunset. Or a blood moon eclipse. The eclipse was just the best I could do with the equipment I had, but something is better than nothing and I learned the difficulties of exposing for the surprisingly bright moon. F11 and the inverse of the ISO, a rule for the ages.

I took more than a few snapshots while on the road. I stumbled across some from the summer of 2007, where I started in Boston, DC, Chicago, London for a month, Belgium for a long weekend, Germany for a month, then home for a week before Mexico City… that was a busy year.

I have a lot of photographs from the era somewhere, but here’s a smattering. Some from Chicago, London, Munich, and the Mosel where it is always cloudy yet charmingly beautiful. Or maybe that was all the wine.

Then there were pictures of Doug’s little asshole dog. I hate that dog. Ugly as the day is long, but he makes up for it with an awful personality. The picture in the jeep is pure portrait art, though. I’m actually proud of that one.

Of course, there are about a billion photos of Nono. If I was taking a picture in the house, she’d find a way to get in it, so I often used her as a focal point anyway.

I recall once sitting in a coffee shop with a young girl I’d befriended a couple of years before at an open mic at a different coffee shop and meeting her there was pure happenstance. We had discussed photography in the past, and music, and cat memes, and whatever else it is you talk to 17 year old girls about… actually that’s pretty much all there was to talk about. So when she came over to say hello I showed her my brand new camera, which had arrived only an hour before. Her first comment was “I’ll be disappointed if the first thing you took a picture of was anything but your cat.”

I’d like to say I’d disappointed her, but the first few photos here were on the card when she pushed play. The rest are just random pics that were on this hard drive.