SARhounds' photostream  

Enjoying my 3rd career now, as a Microsoft SharePoint (collaboration framework) developer. I work on Coronado Island, which is one of the prettiest parts of America's Finest City -- San Diego, California. It actually makes the one hour (1 way) commute from our home in Oceanside worth the effort.

My main focus, outside of work, is the K-9 Search and Rescue group that my wife and I founded, Southwest Search Dogs. This is an all-volunteer group that uses dogs to look for missing people and human remains. My wife and I each have a Bloodhound (Becca and Jessie) and a Vizsla (Couper and Cielo, respectively) as partners, but we have a wide variety of breeds in our unit. Here is a link to my Southwest Search Dogs Collection. Also, here's a short video explaining what we do, another one of Cielo and me during a practice session, and a music video of Cielo that I captured as he was "relaxing" after a training session. All three require Windows Media Player for viewing.


Burrowing Owl (Athene cunicularia).
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This species holds a special significance for me, since the Spanish word for it is Tecolote, which was my dad's trademark. Besides being a world-renowned gladiolus hybridizer and at one time one of the largest commercial gladiolus cut-flower growers in the country, he perfected the Tecolote brand of ranunculus and also grew freesias, anemones, watsonias, oxalis, paper whites, and many other species that I don't remember.

The strains that he started are still being commercially grown today at The Flower Fields in Carlsbad, California. There is a fairly accurate history of my family's flower business on their History page, where there are (bad) photos of my mom and dad and the Model A Woody that he rebuilt, including all the wooden parts. I'm so proud of all that my dad accomplished and wish like heck that he was still around to see this photo, because I know he'd really like it.

My interest in photography goes back a long way, to when I was an intern with a professional portrait photographer and I was the photographer for our high school's yearbook. The camera I used then was a 4X5 Graphlex (an example of which can be seen at famous Flickr photographer Mike Jones' contact page) that would only hold two sheets of film at a time. After graduating from high school, I took a 30-day trip across the country, in an un-air conditioned school bus, during the month of July, with a church group, during which I borrowed my dad's Argus C-3. During my time in the Army (after being drafted, during the Vietnam war), I was able to get a good price on a Minolta Maxxum 7000 and it was my first "good" camera, but I hardly ever used it.

My first digital camera was a Canon G-3, but when I found out that DSLR's were available for under $1,000, I bought a Canon Digital Rebel, which I have since given to my grandson and replaced with a Canon XTi. I have since added a Canon 40D and a Canon 5D Mark II. During the years with my original DSLR, I captured relatively few images and it is only since joining Flickr, on 9/1/07, that I have developed a passion for photography and spend most of my free time on it, including the time I spend on Flickr.