About bclee / Brian Lee  

A former resident of Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Illinois, and New Mexico who has spent a considerable fraction of his life in Colorado, I currently reside in California. Which explains why so many of my pictures are from Utah. Or not. Hmmm.

A lot of what I photograph is "rock art" -- Native American pictographs and petroglyphs. I have a special interest in certain archaic styles, especially Barrier Canyon Style. BCS sites are rare, often remote, and generally unprotected. Developed and well known sites I generally geotag -- look for a map link on the photo page. But many of these sites have been vandalized, so the people who know about the lesser known sites are very protective of them and very cautious about sharing their locations. Thus, many of the sites I visit, I've been told where they are only under the condition that I not pass that information along. If you don't know me personally, please don't ask for the locations of these sites, you're asking me to break a promise I made to someone else. I've gotten enough questions recently that I'm starting to think about making these photos private -- I know several other people who take this approach in order to avoid being asked all the time. But I'd rather be able to share the art.

I may or may not occasionally write on my blog. You can see a few older photos on my Rock Art Photo Collection and/or my Multiply page. Someday I plan to post some of what I have on Flickr back on my rock art page in a more organized form, but Flickr is so much easier. If you are interested in prints, drop me a line, I've started an account at ImageKind so I can put non-watermarked versions there if you see something you like.

"How did you take those pictures?" you may ask. (You must be bored.) Well, if you were to ask me how many cameras I have, I would have to stop and think a while before I could come up with an answer other than "too many." (The same goes for computers. It has recently occurred to me that this might be a problem. In fact a few weeks back I found two computers in a closet that I didn't even know were there. But that was Amy's fault.)

At the moment I have 4 SLRs. I currently use mostly a Canon EOS 40D and a Canon EOS Elan 7ne for film. For about the last year when I have a choice I've been using FujiFilm Provia 100 because the resolution is fantastic (when everything goes perfectly I can get nearly 20 megapixels of resolution from it). The color is a bit more muted than Velvia, and for me both come out a bit too blue/cyan/green from my scanner but I have fewer problems along those lines with Provia. I scan my own film with a Nikon Super Coolscan 5000, because how can you resist a product with words like "Super" and "Cool" and an impressively large number all in the name.

Before my (recent) switch to Canon I was using a Minolta X-700 manual focus camera as my main film camera, and before that a Minolta XG-M camera that my parents purchased sometime before 1983 and my Mom gave to me because she didn't like it nearly as much as the old SRT's. (I have at least two photos posted from one of those SRT's, probably the one my older brother still uses, those things are indestructible.) For those the kind of film I used was all over the map, but later on I tended to prefer Fujifilm Velvia 50 or 100 slide film. I gave up on that because it didn't seem to get along with my Nikon Coolscan IV film scanner, especially if it was underexposed, and at some point before slide scanners I developed the habit of shooting slide film slightly underexposed. So if you run across a picture of mine that looks freakishly cyan or green, chances are good that it's underexposed Velvia.

On the digital side, before the 40D I had more digital point and shoot digital cameras than I can remember (mostly bought used off Craig's List, and mostly Nikon) but never took any of them seriously as cameras until I was given a Kodak P712. That camera has its high and low points but it was the first digital camera I had that made me want more from my SLR, which is quite a feat. And at the moment it's the camera that's always with me, because carrying the 40D around is like carrying a brick, I only do it when I'm really serious. Well, when I'm _really_ serious I still shoot film.

Currently I do most of my post-processing in PhotoShop CS3 (thanks to Amy). I sometimes use Noiseware for noise reduction, although the 40D rarely needs it. I've also sometimes use GNU Gimp (especially if I'm traveling). Apple OS X is currently my preferred operating system (how can you argue with a user friendly UNIX) but I have computers in the house running at least 2 different major versions of OS X, Linux, and Windows. And one running a pre-windows Microsoft OS that some claim is the last OS Bill Gates wrote code for. But I only bring out that one to frighten people. Well, I could say the same for the one running Windows ME.


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