Who I Am/This Site
I am LRH. My old family members sometimes called me "Little Larry," ha ha. But I'm middle-aged now, hardly little anymore, ha ha.
I am into photography BIG-TIME as a hobby, many say I should be doing it as a profession, although I'm not sure. I have had, and still have, many photo-sharing sites already, for quite sometime--and those are still in operation & updated. However, I started this blog as a way of sharing my photos in a "newsfeed" sort of manner, to make it easy to see the new ones specifically in a time-line like format, with descriptions of the context--somewhat like status updates in Facebook, but apart from that site as I don't like how that site handles photographs. Also, as no one here will be "tagged" with their name linking to their own site, there's nothing to be nervous about in terms of the photos being "out there" as it were.
Background, Early Days
I have been into photography as a hobby since I was a 13 year-old. I got a Kodak pocket camera for Christmas 1981, however, an avid reader at the time (and still), I read a lot about "serious" photography-grade cameras & how to operate them while in the school's library. Such books dominated my time back then. Before long, I had subscriptions to photography magazines. Through it all, I learned what f-stops, shutter speeds, depth-of-field, exposures, and much more were. However I didn't have the camera to match all of this, since it was a mere Kodak snapshot camera. What I needed was an SLR, or "single lens reflex."
The next year, January 1983, I managed to get my 1st such camera, a Nikon EM 35mm SLR. For the next 20-odd years, I'd enter phases where I was "into" photography again and other phases where I'd almost never take a photograph of anything. Part of this was due to the fact that I can have that tendency towards interests--hot and "into it" big-time for awhile, it dominates my attention, then I start to lose interest & "bottom out," going months or even years without giving it a moment's thought. Another part of it was because this was in the days before digital, and film-processing costs prohibited me from really being able to make a serious go of it. I'd get a few "winners" here & there, but not consistently enough to offset the costs & aggravation.
Often-times, I'd find that the photos from the "snapshots" crowd looked as good as mine, or even better, and I didn't want to embarrass myself, as I had made a big deal about how good I was or intended to be one day and how I had the nice gear to make it possible. I'd always read that one needs to practice a lot to get there, but with no real friends with the same interests and with film-processing costs holding me back, I could never really break through.
Often-times, I'd find that the photos from the "snapshots" crowd looked as good as mine, or even better, and I didn't want to embarrass myself, as I had made a big deal about how good I was or intended to be one day and how I had the nice gear to make it possible. I'd always read that one needs to practice a lot to get there, but with no real friends with the same interests and with film-processing costs holding me back, I could never really break through.
Digital Allows Me To Bust Open the Doors
However, fully 20 years later, starting in August 2003, when I got my first digital camera, a 2mp Nikon Coolpix 775 pocket camera, things started to take off. It was a perfect match: a marriage of my love of taking photographs with my computer side. (I had developed into something of a "computer nerd" for sometime.) It took me no time at all to figure out how to manage the photos on the computer, edit/rename/backup etc, and now I could pretty much take as many as I wanted.
Still, I wasn't quite yet able to break through in terms of taking "artistic" photos as I liked to do, as the camera I had was a "snapshot" type, not of the "serious" grade like an SLR--and ones that were remained too expensive for me. This changed for me in 2004, starting with the Nikon Coolpix 5700 in May and ESPECIALLY with the Canon Digital Rebel/300D, my first digital "SLR," in November. (Later in 2005 I got a Nikon D50 digital SLR, as I prefer Nikons, but couldn't afford what Nikon was selling prior to that.)
How to Use This Site
All of the photos you see can be enlarged for a bigger experience. Simply hover your mouse over the image and click and it will enlarge. Each photo has "click to enlarge" displayed above it to remind you of this.
Also, beside this reminder, each image has a caption with its unique file-name, something like 20110328_160255_nl_d3000. This is a unique identifier for every image, and happens to be the actual filename it occupies on my hard drive. The first 2 parts tell you the date and time of day the shot was taken. The main reason for this caption, though, is this: if you wish to have a physical print copy of a given photograph, if you copy-paste this filename and pass it along to me, that will identify for me which image it is you wish for me to print. You won't have to say "the one of Adrian throwing his buggers at the cat," ha ha.
Here is an example (my father & I, taken on 12-24-2004):
Click to enlarge (20041224_110254_b_5700)
The caption reminds you that clicking on the image will enlarge it (you can do it here as well, to see--go ahead & try). The other part of the caption, 20041224_110254_b_5700, is the FILE-NAME of the image, uniquely identifying it. If you desire a conventional print, simply pass along this file-name (copy & paste is the easy way to do this) and that tells me exactly what photograph it is you're wanting a print of. Think of it as, say, your electricity's account number or your social security number etc.
Closing
I will eventually update this site with links to the photo galleries as well, and other things. I will let you know when that happens.
LRH
