Hello!

Hi, welcome to my new blog.  After being gently nudged for some time by my wife (with a cattle prod), I finally decided to take the plunge and start a blog.  I guess Lee got tired of my constant blathering about photography and figured this would redirect me to the web, where I could ramble on and nobody would have to pay attention.  So here I am!

The photograph at the top of the page is our dog, Winston, with a new friend.  Winston is an old guy of 16 who still has a zest for life.  He was in our back yard the other day when I noticed him looking at something very intently and wagging his tail.  It was this baby robin.  Putting Winston back in the house, I ran upstairs and grabbed my camera.  After taking a few shots of the robin alone, I let the dog back outside and took this picture.  Immediately afterward, the mother robin squawked and the baby flew away.  Winston is the gentlest dog I have ever known.  Until she died last year, his best friend was a cat named Sabina.

Last Friday, I met my friend Dick downtown for lunch.  Leaving early, I stopped by Cleveland's industrial area, the Flats, to take pictures.  My favorite is Escher's Stairway, taken with my Nikon D200 modified to capture infrared light.  I decided not to convert it to black & white as I thought the red color was kind of cool.  It's a closeup of a curved stairway going up a large storage tank.  Taken in bright morning sunlight, I found the shadows very interesting.  Even though I know what it is, I find it difficult to see it that way.  The shadows often become stairs to me, or I can see some of them as shadows and others as stairs at the same time in different parts of the image.  Very confusing.  I have always enjoyed Escher's work so I named it after him as the photograph could not be the way I often see it.

Well, this ends my first post.  The good news is that I finally have a blog.  The bad news (for Lee) is that I'm still going to blather endlessly about photography.  Hope any of you who stumbled onto this site enjoyed it.