Welcome to a blog with pictures.

I started out as an engineer taking things apart somewhere back about 9-years old. I once took a little automatic pistol to pieces and lost a few tiny pins. It reduced me to bringing it to the big “Sportsman’s Corner” sporting goods store in Reno where a gunsmith made some new ones and put it right. What a failure for a child! I bought cheap tools at the local Grant’s department store and started taking cars apart at 15 when not building shortwave radio kits or wandering around the desert and alleys behind clubs and bars.

The time in the dark arts was spent with spacecraft and other machines of a kind while living in Silicon Valley.

My parents had a two-lens Graflex-22 camera I figured out. (Sadly, I did not have the tools to take it apart.) A light meter would have been an expensive luxury, so I just guessed exposures using the instructions that came in the Kodak film boxes. Film and developing still is expensive and all the processing then was done at the local K-Mart, or wherever it was cheapest.

 

I got a Polaroid Swinger one Christmas and took many pictures with it. We don’t need no stinking drugstore!

Somewhere in college I got a Fujica ST 801 that still works. It was stolen and cost $25 at a pawn shop to get back along the way. Then came an Olympus OM 2S that still works. It had a design flaw in the power supply causing it to eat batteries. Olympus fixed it once, but the problem came back.

Ansel Adams books, “The Camera”, “The Negative”, and “The Print” taught me better photography with the OM 2, until I got an Olympus C-4000 Zoom in 2001. Finally, I could take photographs and process them adequately using Adobe Photoshop Elements 1.0 that came free with the camera.

I shoot Olympus cameras now and process with various SW, except for Lightroom for religious reasons. It’ an old Apple, Steve Jobs, Silicon Valley thing.

At this writing, 2020, I am the president of the Thousand Oaks Photo Group.

Besides this over long aside, this website contains various unrelated blog posts and photo galleries of whatever photography I might be doing. There are some old film bits here too.

For your entertainment, or not. Photographs belong to the viewer, not the photographer. It’s like writing and building bridges in that way.