I get a lot of praise and questions on my pictures (not the ones of me below LOL but the black and whites on the rest of the site). So I wanted to make a not on photography. It’s a big part of my life and I love doing it. It seems so easy to capture such a wide variety of feelings in stills, particularly black and white, and send such powerful messages to people on subjects long past, or otherwise hard for people to personally experience. I think it’s amazing how you can represent a feeling or emotion with a picture, even though the picture isn’t actually of (somehow) that emotion.

I have taken a few photography classes and use two types of cameras take my pictures. All the pictures on my site (including the black and whites) where taken locally. I use both digital and SLR (35mm) technologies; I find they have their own uses. Both my cameras are Canons, I don’t normally like their products, but I love their cameras and they come at a fair price. I have owned a Canon digital camera since digital cameras first came out in the late 90’s; I am on my 4th generation. My newest one, a Canon PowerShot S30, can do EVERYTHING. You might think I am exaggerating, but I am not, I came home a few days after I bought it, and it had washed my dishes and made my bed. I was impressed. It takes movies with sound, runs at a 3. something mega pixel rating and uses good old flash cards. It can do black and white, panoramic, posters all sorts of funky color palettes, close ups, uber zoom, good optical zoom, and most importantly, I can control it in total manual for exposure time and aperture levels. I have a 32mb card and a 16mb card along with a portable USB adapter to transfer the pictures to my desktop or my laptop.

For my SLR camera I use a Canon Rebel 2000 with its standard lens. Great all around SLR with all the standard features plus various levels of automatic and settings that allow you to control (manually) either the exposure or the aperture while having the camera automatically compensate and calculate the other variable. I take both color and black and whites with this one; it’s a nice durable camera and lightweight for its size. I have a HP 3200SE scanner to scan pictures on to my computer and I use Photoshop and a great little (free) program called IrfanView to modify and save my pictures.

I take the pictures at local parks, real local to UMD. Chester bowl and the park around Rock Hill (behind Oakland Apts) are two of my favorite sites. Also like to take pictures in the city of Duluth and at the parks up and down the lake Shore.

Last of all I use a variety of lightweight alloy or plastic tripods and bipods to stabilize my cameras. And, just as important, I have well padded storage bags for both cameras since I tend to run around outside with them a lot.

Thers currently no particular order to these pictures. I will be redoing this all in an index, so please be patient =-)