Old Dog Photography

Well, folks — the Wordpress database that underlies this blog is misbehaving again. Since it’s the third time in as many months that I’ve been faced with the prospect of scrubbing through the database looking for corruption, this situation has given me the painful opportunity to take a hard look at things.

Meanwhile, I’ve actually started making a (tiny) bit of money off my photography — namely, off some images I’m licensing via Getty’s arrangement with Flickr. So since I’d wanted to take things in a more professional direction anyway, it occurred to me that this would be a good time for an abrupt break with the past (nearly) 2 years that I’ve been running this site.

So here’s the plan…

In a few days I’m going to push the existing database off to a related “archive” URL — so no posts or comments will be lost, but they’ll live at a slightly different address, and I’ll disable further comments on these “historic” posts at some point after the move. Meanwhile, in my super-secret underground laboratory, I’m furiously working on Rev. 2.0 of the Argos / Old Dog Photo site. When I move the old material off to the archive site, the new layout will “go live” at the current URL.

Some things will look similar, but a lot will change since I’m aiming for a more-professional looking site. Meanwhile, by starting with a “fresh” (empty) database, I’m hoping to leave some of the historic database issues behind us.

Wish me luck…

A very cooperative “bearded dragon,” photographed at the Denver Zoo:

For strobist types out there, I had my FL-36R off-camera, hand-held in my left hand and connected to the hot shoe via cable. Gives the little critter a dramatic air, if you asked me…

One of the really nice extras of the holiday season from a photographer’s perspective is that a lot of places put on special shows for a few weeks. A local botanical garden got all prettied up, so we swung by a few nights ago (before the most recent storm hit). Here’s one shot that I beat my head against for a while until I got happy with it:

You see, the lights on the tree are all blue — but since the camera’s dynamic range is less than that of a standard-issue human eye, they look white in this shot. I tried multiple exposures, HDR, the works — and just couldn’t recover the color in the brightest parts of the lights. Oh, well — after all the fuss, I finally got comfortable with this anyway…

Hope you & yours have a wonderful holiday season, regardless of how / whether you worship!

Another shot from my recent nighttime photowalk at the Denver Zoo:

Unlike some of the other zoo residents, this little critter (a Mossy Frog) was more than happy to sit still for me while I tried a few different flash settings on him. From the placard:

This frog from Vietnam has evolved skin warts, protrusions, and colors that closely mimic mosses and lichens on trees. They are extremely difficult to see when settled into grooves in tree bark, where they sleep during the day.

On the return leg of our recent Hawaii vacation, I was on a red-eye flight — great if you can figure out how to sleep on a plane, not so great if you’re tall enough that you’re essentially shoe-horned into your coach-class seat (thanks, United!). At least my lack of sleep meant I was awake to see the sunrise as we flew east over the Rockies:

I liked the combination of sunburst above and dark land / city lights below. After some poking around, I’m pretty sure those are the lights of Provo, Utah in the distance…