Flickr: Strychnine

Photography is capturing beauty in light. This is something that one has to do with their entire being. It's probably the perfect hobby for me, since there are plenty of technical elements to keep the analytical me occupied, but the true essence of the art is in the passion and feeling that go into capturing a moment.

My main camera is a Nikon D300. I recently picked up a Canon PowerShot S90. It is one of the very few cameras that is lightweight, compact, and capable of producing good photographs in the difficult lighting conditions of a glacier.

Lenses
Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 DX my everyday lens, probably on my camera 75% of the time
Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 DX this super-light lens is perfect for mountaineering
Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 AF great for indoor and low-light conditions, great "low budget" portrait lens
Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 VR this lens is a piece of optics art
Nikkor 105mm f/2.8 Micro I'm still getting the hang of macro shots

My past cameras include a Kodak DC280 Zoom, a Canon ELPH, a Nikon N6006, a Nikon D70, a Keystone 110 format camera, and a Spider-Man 126 format camera.

These days, post-processing is analogous to the darkroom process in the days of film. I consider this part of the process equally important to the part that happens in the field with a camera. I generally follow the workflow outlined below:

I shoot in RAW whenever possible, and I import photos from memory card directly into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. At the end of a day of shooting in the field, this is done at the hotel to a Windows laptop with a big external hard drive. If it's an important shoot, I'll also back up to another drive. If I have time, I'll make some preliminary Lightroom tweaks on the laptop. When I get home, I import all of the work thus far into my Mac Pro and continue the process on Lightroom. Kudos to Adobe for true cross-platform compatibility.

Most of the adjustments that I need these days are superbly handled by Lightroom alone. If necessary, I can send a file to Adobe Photoshop and tweak further there. These days, less than 1% of photos require treatment in Photoshop as far as the processing workflow goes.

I calibrate my monitors (even the laptop!) using an Xrite i1 Display 2.