This is my first blog post. I don’t have much to say just yet, so I shall talk at length. I’ve only just gotten the site and theme configured mostly to my liking. But we have to start somewhere that isn’t just lorem ipsum. That means rambling, and lord, I was born a ramblin’ man.

To begin with, I am a photographer. Not a professional photographer, just some schmuck who likes cameras and has for most of his life. For a lot of years I’ve been taking photographs and just dumping them in a directory on one of my servers to show anyone who acts interested. Really inefficient, I know, but those were the heady days of the late 90s and early 2000s, and we did what we had to do. We were lucky to even have photographs we could put online, as we had to walk to the fotomat up hill, both ways, in the snow right up until 2003 when I got a decent digital camera.

I tried using the facebook in the early 2010s, but it just did such horrible things to any photo I uploaded I stopped trying. Now I don’t do anything on anti-social media at all, and I don’t remember the last time I logged in to the face book. Probably a decade ago, and it was already a toxic cess pool of social negativity. I can’t imagine it now. I’m not a ticktocker or an instagrammarian, either, and twitter formerly known as X or whatever it is has never interested me.

You wonder why I started shooting film again? I sound like a Luddite! I promise, I’m not that bad. I just wanted control over my work and data.

I still took photographs when I traveled, even if I didn’t share them publicly, and I bought a lovely Nikon mirrorless in 2019 to join the modern era. I was planning to do a lot of music photography, specifically, so I was taking photos of bands. Lots of people were asking to see them.  I used a random site that I owned as a temporary measure, and it was — is — a mess because I just dumped galleries up there willy nilly. The galleries were also buried in blog posts, because pandemic, and what the hell else do you do but write. Four years later the temporary site is worse than ever, and still being used, so it’s three and a half years overdue for a replacement.

This site will be different. If you want my ramblings, they’ll be here in the blog. But the site’s format will be photos first. Galleries, portfolios, and images I am either proud of, or have a reason to share.  This blog?  It’ll still be here. I’ll post about cameras I use, film I like, tests and experiments, techniques, or whatever comes to mind . I’ll even post images that aren’t curated for their quality if they illustrate something I’m interested in. That’s what blogs are for.

You may note that I’ve had this domain since right after the lockdowns and am only just getting it working in 2024.  Let’s not mince words on this one, it is hard to honestly say to myself “You know what the internet needs more of? An amateur photographer talking about cameras!” But what it does need is a URL for me to send someone when they ask to see my work, and especially when I take shots I want to share with them.

Here it is!  Now I just need to upload some decent photos and get going.   Meanwhile, I just did a little walk around with a Nikon S3. Next blog post might be about the experience of using that state of the art machine and some photos from the test rolls I shot.

The featured image for this blog is Portra 160, lab scanned, no idea what the settings were. I’m guessing f/5.6 1/200.

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