Equipment Used in the Past

Over the years I've had my share of point-and-shoot cameras. Here's a smattering of them:

* Kodak Ready-Flash 110mm
* Minolta Talker 35mm
* Sony DSC-P9

My first real digital camera was an Olympus D-600 that I bought at CompUSA in 1997. It could only take pictures that were 640 dpi x 480 dpi and had a stock 18-35 "zoom" lens. And it would only take 4 AA batteries which lasted for approximately 34 pictures without flash or 14 pictures with flash.

Current Equipment Used

Today, I am using the following equipment:

- Nikon D300 (primary)
- Nikon D40 (secondary)
- Nikon 18-70mm AF
- Nikon 50mm
- Sigma 70-200mm AF w/o VR
- Nikon 70-300mm AF w/ VR


For those times where a point-and-shoot is more reasonable, I rely on a Canon PowerShot SD900.

From time to time, it's still nice to use an older film camera that makes the user really think. For that, I fall back to my father's Canon AE-1 Program (yes, the one that takes real film). And the lenses for that camera are a Tokina 50-200mm and a Soligar 28-50mm.

A few times, I may actually wind up using the camera on my iPhone when needed.

Hardware and Software

Just as with film, there is processing that needs to be once the image has been captured in binary data. To do that, I use a couple of different pieces of hardware and software.

Hardware includes my Mac Pro running Snow Leopard. Photos are stored on a 1TB Western Digital internal HDD. Backup is to a dedicated 3TB external HDD running Time Machine. A Canon LiDE 600F scanner takes care of any older pictures I come across.

On the road, a MacBook Pro and LaCie 100GB portable drive do the work of keeping the photos for me.

For processing, I use Adobe Lightroom 3. In rare instances, I'll take a processed image into Photoshop, especially if I am going to do any manipulation. In instances where I need to do full layouts for projects like calendars, books, or ads, I'll use a mix of Photoshop and Illustrator, two great products from Adobe.

In years gone by, I have used just about every image editing program in the marketplace. To say the least, it is amazing how far we have come from a simple program like KoalaPainter and geoPaint on the Commodore 64 through MS Paint, Paint Shop Pro, CorelDraw, and who could forget the Aldus software products like FreeHand and PhotoStyler.

All of this knowledge comes together to produce the photos you see on this site.