My Photography

Gehry concert hall in LA
shot with Olympus 2.1 MP P&S

Photography is a hobby for me. I’ve been taking pictures since the early sixties, but most of my early negatives and prints got lost during my wanderings.

When digital equipment came out, I joined the stampede of early adopters and I haven’t stopped. I had an early 2.1 MP Olympus point-and-shoot and got good enough results with that to go in deeper. I got ambitious and invested in the remarkable Sigma SD10 camera system with the Foveon X3 sensor. Many of the older images below are done with that equipment. I pretty much wore the camera body out, but more importantly, I wore myself out lugging all the gear. The body, the set of six lenses from 12-1000mm, the flash and other accessories, plus batteries and tripod weighed a ton.

Young chalk artist
Shot with Sigma SD-10

Then I discovered the compact Panasonic Lumix ZS – series. I could carry almost the same focal range of glass and even more megapixels easily in my shirt pocket. True, it wasn’t the same filmic image quality as the SD10, it didn’t have the bokeh, and it didn’t quite stretch as long as 1000mm nor as wide as 12mm, but it was pretty darn good.

Driftwood, Pt. Reyes
Shot with DMC ZS10

The end came for me during a hike in the southern part of Point Reyes, an area I don’t know as well as the central and northern parts. I carried the full SD10 gear on my back and the Panasonic in a little belt pouch. As it happened I got a bit lost and spent longer hours on the trek than I planned. I took photos with both cameras along the way. At the end, my back felt just about broken; I’m not as young as I used to be. After I compared the two sets of photos, I put the Sigma equipment up on Craigslist. Since then, I’ve been shooting exclusively with the Panasonic, moving from the ZS3 to the 7 and the 10 and now to the 20. This little marvel is on my belt wherever I go.

My photo albums are all up on Google+ now. For convenience here’s a rough index: