I’m traveling in Scotland with my wife Beverly & was really hoping to be able to post some images while traveling. Unfortunately, while I have been able to get internet access, I have not been able to connect from my computer so I can upload images. We have spent the past 5 wonderful days in Balmoral & now are on our way to the isle of Skye. Perhaps I will have better luck there.

I’m feeling old today. Or, perhaps more accurately, I am feeling like I am supposed to feel old today. You see, today is my 53rd birthday. “Fifty Three”, it just sounds old to me. The reality though is it almost seems incongruous when I say it; “Fifty Three”. I don’t feel old. I certainly don’t feel that old. My ‘left’ brain knows that I have indeed celebrated 53 birthdays in my short life. However my right brain still puts my age somewhere much younger. Perhaps to a fault, I have typically tended to follow my ‘left’ side. So I’m going with the “I’m younger that my age” theory.

I suppose it is all relative.  For a bit of perspective, I’ve attached a couple of images I took recently in Inner Space Caverns.  Everything you see is much older than me.

I’ve spent the last few weeks working on updating my website. Updating is an understatement. Overhaul is more accurate.  My old site was posted a few years ago & pretty much just sat there after that. Obviously, my new site is much more dynamic. By committing to a ‘blog’ format, I a committing myself to keeping the site current. One of my photographer ‘mentors’ Trey Ratcliff commits himself to posting a new image to his site StuckInCustoms every day. What makes that even more remarkable is that I have never seen one of his daily images that I would not be very proud to call my own. He is a brilliant AND prolific photographer. (He does in fact post a disclaimer that he may miss 10-20 days a year…) I’m not quite so ambitious. I intend to post at least once a week. (I’ll try to do more,  I would just prefer to surpass my goal than not reach it. And since my last website was only updated about one a year, 50-75 times a year is quite an improvement.) So far I have barely been meeting my goal, however I also have been actually building the site, assembling & formatting all the images for the galleries, building the pages etc. And since as I am writing this, the site is not yet ‘live’ so no-one except perhaps my wife & mom have access to it, no one is reading the weekly blogs anyway, yet. 

One of the great opportunities organizing the material for this site has provided me, is an excuse to wander down memory lane & look through the 50,000 or so images on my hard drive & pick a few to show. The photograph below is one I discovered in my archives of a wonderful woman & an extremely talented Austin artist Sarah Pierce performing at Gruene Hall. I’ve had the opportunity to photograph Sarah on various occasions Including producing a short promotional video for her last CD “Cowboys Daughter” & it’s always a treat to work with her. Perhaps one of my favorite type of ‘gigs’ is photographing musicians, you often get to listen to great music & working with any type of talented artist is always a treat.

It’s springtime in Texas. Even driving in the city, the medians & shoulders of the highways are spotted & sometimes covered with a wash of spring color. Unfortunately, I have not had the opportunity this spring to make it out into the central Texas countryside so I am cheating a bit & posting a photo I took last spring with my 4×5 camera near Ennis Texas. While these days most of my photography is done digitally with my Nikon, there is nothing like the detail in a 4×5. For perspective, while a good digital image these days is between 10 & 20 mega pixels, this image was originally scanned at 500 mega pixels. I actually have a 40″ by 50″ print of this image hanging in my dining room & you can see every leaf & petal.