We're UCD alumni working in the Sacramento area chronicling various travels, events, and people in our lives through the wonder of photography.

Erik is the primary photographer here although Julia contributes on occasion, and we both utilize this space to present our other arts and crafts, specifically Julia’s knitting and my painting and associated drawings. Some of these items focus more on the art rather than the photo, and in the case of the drawings and paintings are often scanned from a relatively cheap and dated UMAX scanner dating back to the mid 1990’s (to scan in old prints).

The camera of choice is a Pentax k10d, Erik purchased for Christmas in 2007. The k10d has allowed my photography to evolve coupled with the flexibility and creativity the RAW file format provides. Previous to the k10d, the Panasonic FZ-15, a Prosumer dSLR like camera provided some beautiful photography although admittedly the technique behind the photography was very basic. Other cameras have included an early Fuji Finepix point & shoot (2 MP max) and my trust Minolta SLR that was fully manual and inherited from my grandfather. Very few photos will show up from those cameras, although as my organization improves, they may pop up in the future.

My photography style centers around landscape, nature, and limited macro photography. As a civil engineer, I also enjoy taking shots of architecture and other engineering marvels and even occasionally post photos from construction sites as appropriate. In terms of the images themselves, I am not one for the digital darkroom, so processing is limited. I enjoy the flexibility RAW processing can provide, but I don’t do very much in that regard as if a photo looks bad, I have very little creativity in visualizing a possible fix (and I am too self critical for that). I rather take multiple photos and select the best of a bunch rather than take one and rely on processing to fix it.

I’ve used Flickr off and on since 2003, but the current incarnation of our site came about in the summer of 2007 when Yahoo Photos and Sony Imagestation both went down. As a Yahoo Photos member, Flickr was a free option / trial, so that became our focus for a new website. Couple that with AT&T’s link, and Flickr has pretty much sealed the deal.

With the birth of a niece and nephew and the proliferation of photos that came about with my Panasonic and Pentax cameras, organization has become a key issue. Use of the program IMatch has allowed me to organize photos like never before, which is good since my current digital photography total has topped 20,000 images. This coupled with the fascination that newer technology has provided, specifically geotagging, the benefits have started to appear in Flickr (see this page for a map of our photos note that the map is weighted towards the most recent photos). In October and November 2008, these organization efforts have led to the use of collections and sets allowing the organized expansion of our Flickr site.

In the near future, many of the photos that lack tags or geotags will be replaced. The continued organization on the home front will also see the addition of older photos that have never been uploaded. The fun in processing photos for black and white has also become a hobby (and a great way to process otherwise dull photos) as has the capability that HDR provides for presenting photos that are otherwise dynamically limited.

Ultimately, what we are seeing here is the beginning of a fantastic hobby where Flickr has provided a community that expands our knowledge of which we hope to continue contributing to.