I am an engineer, blogger, and casual photographer in San Diego, California. My goal in almost all of my online endeavors is to capture the moments of my life, and my greatest passion is telling a rich, engaging story in the thin-sliced millisecond of a shutter release.
Hire
I currently don't freelance or seek to make any money off of my photography. I have enough jobs, and due to catastrophic creative differences with a former art professor I prefer to keep my more artistic endeavors strictly as a hobby.
License
All of my images are under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license. You are more than welcome to link any image on your blog, print out a huge poster to go on your wall, or even appropriate into your own projects. All I ask is that you drop me an email or leave a note on that image's Flickr page (and share any derivative work with the same freedoms). It makes me happy.
Book
I've
published my own book on the aftermath of the 2007 San Diego fires. If you are interested in a copy please let me know. From the dust jacket:
In October of 2007, wildfires raged across 500,000 acres of San Diego over 19 tense and devastating days. At least 1500 homes were destroyed and thousands more were damaged, pushing the total cost of the fires over 2 billion dollars. An estimated 900 thousand people were evacuated from their homes, making these fires the cause of the largest evacuation in US history.
These are the photographs I took of the Westwood community of Rancho Bernardo only hours after President Bush visited the area on October 25th. The National Guard's blockade around the area had just been lifted, and only a few families had returned to their homes to begin salvaging the remains. In spite of being a close neighbor and former resident of Westwood, I was initially very uncomfortable intruding on the privacy of these families until I realized that I wasn't there taking pictures of the destruction...there were enough other people doing that. Every one of these houses has a story to them, somebody's life. I'm just one more person trying to tell that story.
Site
I had a hell of a time finding a clean, simple, non-flash slideshow generator, so I don't mind revealing that the slideshow on this site is powered by
Google's AJAX feed API and a custom tagged Flickr feed. By default, this combination generates yucky 75 x 75 pixel thumbnails, so I created a
Yahoo! Pipe to enable medium sized images. This method also allows you to include way more than the 20 images Flickr publishes in each RSS feed.
Tech
I use a Nikon d80 for most of my images, but I'll pull out my Pentax Optio 750z when I feel like being challenged. One of my most famous podium-pounding speeches I give to people asking me how to get into photography is that the technology does not make a good photographer. Start out with whatever point and shoot digital camera you can find on sale that has a full manual mode. Upgrade only when your gear can no longer satisfy your vision.
Next
Even though I have no desire to make money, my next steps are to have more images published. I want to travel more. I want to use more natural lighting. I want to use less post-processing. I want to take more pictures that
make me cry.
