John H Bowman's photostream  

I have been interested in photography since getting my first camera at age 7. Many cameras later (digital for a few years), I am a retired uiversity professor enjoying the opportunity to travel with my wife, spend time with grandchildren, and work on different aspects of photography. We live near Richmond, Virginia, a location convenient to Williamsburg, the Blue Ridge Parkway and Skyline Drive, and many other interesting places.

My photos are pretty much as taken. Everything posted through Septemberr 2009 was processed using the Windows version of Photoshop Elements 2.0, which came with my first digital camera. I began capturing RAW images in August 2009 and started working with RAW files in late September, when I also switched from PC/Windows to Mac and began using the latest version of Photoshop Elements (which still is 6.0 for Mac). Thus, in the fall of 2009, I'm adjusting to these new tools. My editing generally is limited to such things as cropping, contrast adjustment, and occasionally some color tweaks. I've not attempted HDR, for example, and probably won't, mostly because it probably would take a good bit of time.

In posting photos, I often fail to stay with those from a given trip or season before moving on to something else -- call it a short attention span. However, I have a number of sets in which related photos are grouped; one of my main objectives is developing interesting sets and collections (an effort still evolving, after more than a year on Flickr) that people can visit long after the photos were first posted. Starting in the summer of 2010, I am developing collections of sets to make it somewhat easier -- I hope -- to find photos of a given sort or subject.

To enhance the viewing experience, in late October and early November 2009 (over a year after joining Flickr) I added the large-view option to all my images, for all viewers. The light box feature added by Flickr's mid-2010 reworking of the photo display made it unnecessary for me to add the large-view option myself.

When I joined Flickr in October 2008 (and for over a year before), I shot with a Canon EOS 40D and my older 20D; while on a trip to Italy and Switzerland in May 2010, however, a bag containing the camera (40D), lens (24-105 L), two filters, and some other gear was stolen in Switzerland. All the stolen equipment was replaced within a few weeks, with an EOS 7D taking the place of the 40D; unfortunately, the photos from 10 days in Italy are lost forever.

Since April 2008, my primary lens is a Canon 24-105 f4 L IS; this is augmented by three other Canon L-series EF lenses: 17-40 f/4, 70-200 f/4 IS, and 100mm Macro f/2.8 IS. Many posted pictures were taken with a Canon EF-S 17-85 IS lens and others with a Canon PowerShot S2 IS; the latter was replaced in late 2008 with a PowerShot G10, for the times I don't want to bother with bulky equipment and/or want the benefit of its face-recognition technology.

I started in January 2010 to put my photos on the map; most are now there, but I still have roughly 5% to go.

In posting photos, I try to provide information about the subject. It is interesting for me to learn more about the things I have seen. Similarly, I find others' photos more interesting when some information about them is provided. When I view a photo with no information, I am unlikely to comment: If the photographer cannot be bothered to write something about the photo, why should a viewer?

With regard to bothering to write, I confess it bothers me when someone likes a photo well enough to select it as a favorite but hasn't taken the time to make any comment at all. I will block someone who carries this approach to an extreme -- e.g., a person selected 24 of my photos as favorites in one session, made no comments on any photos, and had no photos available for viewing by me. In my first 40 months on Flickr, this has occurred only twice (in the 2nd case the number of favorites selected without comment was 32).