The -- Mostly -- Desert Scene

Okay, so here's the deal. In December 2005, my wife gave me a new digital camera for Christmas. I used to do a lot of photography when in college and shortly afterwards, but quit for numerous reasons -- no more room for a darkroom, or time to take pictures, and film is pretty expensive if you rely on a photo lab. I started again a few years ago, with a small Fuji digital camera. It took nice pictures, but they were a bit small (3 megapixels) and show more digital noise than I like. The lens options were non-existent for that camera -- it had a 6x optical zoom integrated into the camera body. The display screen for the camera broke last year; hence the "need" for a new camera.

The new camera is a Konica-Minolta 5D, and takes quite nice 6 megapixel pictures. Back in college days, I used, and liked, Minolta cameras, so for me it was the logical choice. Once I started taking pictures, I wanted some venue to share them. I started with a basic web page -- you can see it with the "Older Pictures" link on the main page (or by clicking the link here). But some folks that found that page (here I mean you, Cricket) complained that they couldn't provide feedback. Hence I decided to try this blog format. The plan is to update at least once a week. I work from home, so that gives me an excuse to get out of the house -- taking the pictures, not the posting bit!

All of the pictures shown here (one so far, but more soon! :-) ) are reduced from the full size images and converted to jpeg format. You can see the full "reduced size" picture by clicking on the image on the blog page. I try to make the long dimension of the images 800 pixels, so that there is a reasonable amount of image definition. The full size pictures are shot in MRW format -- Minolta's raw format -- and sized at 3008 by 2000 pixels, with 12 bits of color information per pixel. Usually the image posted here is only lighly edited -- resized, color saturation sometimes lightly adjusted, and a bit of sharpening (aka "unsharp masking") to make the image look a bit crisper. More information is available on request -- just ask!

All of the pictures are copyrighted, of course. But I tend to not be too picky about sharing (with accreditation), so if you see something you like and would like to use it or just get a bigger copy, post a request and I'll see what I can do to help out!