Welcome to my little area of the Flickrverse. My photostream is not a highly polished collection, as you will find, but rather, a mix of entries dedicated to a few little pet interests I have, and whatever else strikes my fancy at the moment. Some shots are okay, and others, well..... are not exactly meant to show off some imagined great photographic skill. I am hoping to capture a really good shot one of these days, but it may take me a few years......in the meantime, this stream will be more utilitarian than artistic, in many cases.

I run a few groups, one of which is all about schools. I have noticed that people take pictures of beautiful old school buildings, but rarely bother to upload shots of the schools we are currently using. Since these buildings are a big part of a community's life, that seemed a shame to me, so I started the Schoolhouse group to address the situation and to try to spur interest in getting out there to photograph the beautiful (and sometimes not so beautiful) school buildings in our hometowns.

Why do I license all my photos Creative Commons? Because I have been part of public service websites which depend on these photographs for illustrations, particularly wikiHow, which is very grateful to those who have generously provided some of their work. I thought I might as well add to the pool of what can be used by sites which are so useful to the world. After all, I don't plan on marketing my work, but my work does have value, and I am more than happy to share that value. We all give something of ourselves to the community, and in my case, some of what I share is my photostream. I get a lot of pleasure out of contributing photos to the public at large for use in illustrating Wikipedia articles or blogs, or church or school newsletters or school projects or whatever.

I have enabled tagging by the public, so that anyone dropping by can add more tags to any photo, which of course helps those who need Creative Commons photos to find what is useful to them. So tag away!

If you are going to use one of my photos, please link to the photo used, please indicate that the photo is used Courtesy of Ivydawned through Creative Commons (linking back to this page, please). Also, please link to the CC license, which typically will be creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

Thanks for dropping by!