24th day of the year of the owl pellett

Saturday morning and raining lightly at 8:30 AM. The temperature around fifty five. A pretty good day to walk the RW and I will probably do that later. I'm a little whacked by not stupid enough to actually go out in the rain. Funny how people react to different things. One person said they loved the Blog while another asked who had the time to read such BS. I take both in stride and too bad, you all are still going to have to read this stuff, cause I'm driving this bus.

It took me a few years to join the digital photography world. At first the cameras were just too expensive to do what I needed to do and the computer software was also out of reach to mortal man. I over-stayed with the SLRs and bought slide film until it was no longer easily available, paying somewhere around $18 a roll for film and development. The old yard stick was if you got one printable image from a roll of 36, you were doing just peachy! I cannot tell you how many rolls of film I shot over the years, suffice to say I have over 20,000 slides in the files.

My first digital was a little point and shoot at six something megs. I actually used it for a couple of years and made some pretty good pictures from that little Nikon. I just had to get closer to wildlife than before. No more 300 mm lenses with doubler's bringing them up to 460 mm or more. I just had to get closer using what hunting skills I had perfected at my father's tutelage. God bless him, he taught me well and we had such great times in the woods huntin and on boats fishing. Since I took up the cameras I have put down the guns but still use the fishing rods.

I did succumb to the digital last year before a trip to the Alligator Farm in Saint Augustine, Florida. Trading in all of my old equipment in a market which wanted only digital, meant that over $8,000 worth of original equipment brought only ten percent of the original cost. Well, it did got me a Nikon 40DX (10. something megs) with a little zoom lens 18mm to 135mm. I love it. I can put 250 eight by ten photos on something that is no larger than your thumb nail. That trip to Florida, I shot 500 images and culled about as many mistakes off the camera.

Now I have gone nuts. Spending as much time on the puter as behind the camera. The attached image is a digitally merged photo of two of the old slides I made of the Barnegat Lighthouse in NJ and a cloud shot made elsewhere. The resulting image is dramatic, probably to the extreme, but has sold quite readily. This is old Barny as no one has seen. It is original, creative, and unique. The key however, is to make sure that my buyers know that it is digitally enhanced. Digital art is a different art form which should not compete on any level with pure photography. Please enjoy!