As promised, I have produced captions and other informative bits for all the images in the calendar galleries. If you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to enter them below in the comments block.

The picture here is of an altar in the Sonoma (California) Mission. I think the skeleton arms painted on the wall are quite strange and wonder what the significance of this bit of artwork was.

In a discussion about my website, someone asked why I had captions on some of the photos, but not all. The answer is very simple: Laziness/forgetfulness. So, I promise to have captions for all images by the end of the week. Please tell friends about the gallery. I am always interested in comments or questions about the pictures.

By the way, the photo here is a closeup of an oak leaf frozen in a water-filled pink plastic basin, with the reflection of the blue sky that day. This is certainly not a very sexy subject, but somehow it works as a gold, pink and blue abstract. What do you think?

After going through the trauma of totally replacing my computer system, including installing and getting Windows 7 in full operation, I am ready to start paying attention to my website again. Of course, that doesn’t mean I will be making daily entries, but I should be paying a bit more attention to it now.

So for today, I am announcing my 2011 calendar. The printed version is a very limited distribution. I only give it to some close personal friends. However, the images are posted here so you might enjoy them. Just click on the “2011 Calendar” caption in the right-side panel.

I thought I should provide some evidence that I am still  alive and well. It has been almost a month since my last entry. That, of course, is too long. I can only offer in my defense that it has been a very busy month, with some personal matters distracting me, as well as—of course—simple laziness.

During the past month I did manage to place second in a regional photo competition here in the village where I live. It will now go to the state level in August. We will see what the judges in Columbus think of my work at that time. The photo is the one I posted here on April 17. You see it here on display at the exhibition following the judging. I spent a bit of time in Photoshop “jazzing” it up some, but it is essentially the same picture you saw here on that date. It is so hard to guess what judges will like in an image. In the past, I have only entered “pretty” pictures. They did reasonably well, but winning at the state level has eluded me. This time, I thought I would give them an image which is not attractive in the normal sense, but which I think is visually interesting—one which allows the viewer to make up a story about what they see in the photograph. I will report back on the results. Enjoy.

I will now get back to the bigger project of building and commenting on the photos in my gallery over there on the right. As always, your comments are appreciated—good or bad! It’s just nice to know that someone out there has been looking at my work.

Yeah, I know, it’s been a long time since I posted something. A good friend in Massachussets gave me a hard time about this, so I decided it was time to start posting again. Actually, the last post was sent from the Winefest in California. That seems like a long time ago.

The post before that was from Nashville, TN when I was attending a photo workshop there. (I’m glad I beat the big flood by a week or so) One of the pictures was entered in a small local photo contest here in Dayton, by the way. I’ll let you know how it did after June 17, the day of the judging.

The past few weeks have been very busy—and stressful. I sing in a semi-professional chorus and we had a difficult program to prepare, with very little time to do it. I spent a lot of my spare time on that. The concert went surprisingly well, thank goodness, and now the season for that group is over.

 THEN, it happened! My main desktop computer suddenly died. It was an old, but perfectly functioning system, but sooner or later it had to happen—and it did. I spent a bit of time researching the market and deciding what I needed to replace the old faithful computer. I now have a new custom-built system. Some technical data:  Intel i5-750 CPU, Window 7 Pro 64-bit, 8 Gb RAM (with space for 8 Gb more), two hard disks(500 Gb and 1TB), two CD drives, ATI 5750 video card feeding two monitors, etc. It is not a gamer’s system, but otherwise a very capable computer for my purposes. Needless to say, I have been very busy installing a ton of programs and data since the crash of the old sytem. I still have headaches getting the printers to work properly, but I will figure it out.

So, I promise to get a bit more active here on the website, although I do not guarantee an entry every day. I don’t want to become a slave to this.

The picture above, by the way, was taken during a semi-annual event here in Dayton, where all kinds of activities, both official and unofficial—as this one was—take place. The whole downtown was full of people on a beautiful summer evening and I did a lot of street photography. This was just one shot.

Please keep checking back—and tell your friends about the blog. It would be nice get the word out.

The weekend is over, and it was a very interesting and busy one. I spent the entire time with friends at the Dry Creek Wine Festival near Healdsburg, California. We sampled wines and foods at a total of 12 wineries, but had a long way to go to try all of them in the valley—45 or more! For wine lovers it was an especially exciting time. I am not a wine connoisseur, but enjoyed myself immensely. I got a few worthwhile images, which I will put up here as soon as I get back to Ohio. I have provided a sample here.

The rest of the week I will be spending here in Northern California, hoping that the weather cooperates. Today should be fine, but tomorrow and Tuesday do not look good. I’ll post images from time to time.

Greetings from Music City USA. I am in Nashville attending a two-day photography work shop, put on by The Mindful Eye. I will talk more about my experience here later. During a short break today I took this picture across the street in  Printers Alley, a historic district featuring some interesting bars and music joints. This is just one of them. I suspect it looks much better at night, when all those hundreds of little Christmas lights are lit.

I have finally settled on a software package to create and manage my photo presentation here on the blog. It is called “NextGen Gallery” and has the features I need. Other packages did not allow for comments on the photo when it is enlarged for viewing. NextGen does that and is relatively easy for a novice like me to set up and use. As of today I have finished the comments on the 2006 Calendar images. Now I have to finish the job before moving on to other categories of photos.

The picture you see was made this evening when I was enjoying a beer with a friend. We sat by the window of the bar and there was a neon sign right in front of us. So I made this rather abstract image from the back. It’s fun to photograph colors and patterns like this. This is one of those “what is it?” images.

A beautiful but cool day here in Dayton, OH. The ornamental pear trees are absolutely bursting with blossoms, as you can see from this picture I took during my afternoon walk today. This particular type of tree is obviously very popular in this area. The streets are lined with them. It looks almost like a white tunnel in some places. Amazing…

This message was quite different yesterday, but I have had to edit it considerably. I had given notice that I will be using some special software which prevents spambots from accessing this blog and leaving a bunch of nasty messages. Well, I found that it was not working the way it should, so had to uninstall it. I will keep looking for something to provide protection against these “cyber-marauders.”

I am also not satisfied with the gallery software I have been using. When you look a pictures in the gallery on the right, the description of the picture is actually the filename of the picture. I would like to describe each picture more fully, to say something about the location or other special information which might be interesting. However, there is no way that I can do this presently. I have just installed a new gallery software package called Nextgen. So we’ll see if Ican get it working. Keep coming back to see how I am making out. One of these days this blog will look really nice.