About Ed Yourdon / Ed Yourdon  

My DNA



My "day job" is in the IT profession, where I work as a consultant, author, speaker, and expert witness; if you'd like to know more about that part of my life, please visit my website at www.yourdon.com or my blog at www.yourdonreport.com

As for photography: if you'd like to see the 1,000+ photos that were published in various blogs, magazines, newspapers, etc. during the 2008-2009 period, I've collected them all in this Flickr set

How did all this get started? Well, after being frustrated by cheap point-and-shoot cameras (e.g., Kodak Instamatics) in the mid-1960s, I bought my first 35mm SLR camera in 1969, during a period when I lived alone in New York City's Greenwich Village. It was a relatively inexpensive Yashica something-or-other, with a standard 50mm lens and a Tamron 135mm telephoto. A year or two later, I bit the bullet and invested in a Nikon F, and have remained a Nikon fan ever since then. I photographed the street scenes around the Village, as well as the people in Central Park, and then the anti-war Vietnam protesters who marched through the streets. I was already beginning to do a fair amount of traveling in my work, and I took my camera with me to California for my first visit to Big Sur in the late spring of 1969 ...

Being a gadget/technology freak, I started playing with digital cameras as soon as they first appeared, in the mid 1990s -- but didn't really rely on them as my "main" camera until roughly 2004. A couple years ago, I got my first DSLR -- a Nikon D50 -- and gradually moved up the line to a D70, D80, D300, and now a D700. I've got a handful of lenses, but the one I use most often is a VR 18-200mm zoom on the D300 and a VR 70-300mm on the D700, followed by a fixed-length 50mm f/1.4 lens for low-light situations. And I've got a Canon G10 and Canon SD950IS that I use as a medium-quality and compact "pocket camera," to ensure that I have a camera with me no matter where I go. (And I expect the situation to improve noticeably in another month or two when the next-generation iPhone comes out, with a rumored higher-quality built-in camera.)

My Flickr archives contain some 11,000 "restricted" photos (i.e., for friends & family) going back two or three generations, all the way back to 1910; but the "public" photos (of which there are now more than 14,500) start in 1969. There are over 750 album/sets, and I've tried to organize them chronologically, by topic, and with appropriate tags, titles, and annotations to make it easier to find interesting individual photos if you don't have time to go through them all (duh!).

I occasionally photograph flowers and things of that sort, but I'm terrible at macro photography, and I lack the skill, patience, and whatever else it takes to get really good results in that area. So most of what I shoot is either people (in a "street photography" sense, not formal portraits) and landscapes. This is separate from the gazillion family photos of drooling babies and birthday parties, which preoccupied me for much of the 1970s through the 1990s.

I've started taking photography classes and workshops during the past year, so I have a slightly more "informed" understanding of what I'm doing, and what "works" in my photos; but I'm still very much an amateur. I take some pictures simply because I like the colors, shapes, texture, or other artistic aspect; and I take other pictures because I think they tell (or at least suggest) a story. But I often find that I need to write a story explaining the context in which the picture was taken ... so maybe I should have been a photojournalist.

One of the best things about digital photography, in my humble opinion, is that I no longer have any inhibition about shooting anything and everything that might be interesting, as well as dozens of shots of the same scene, especially if it involves people in motion. As everyone knows, a digital image can be erased with the click of a button, and there's no cost involved. That's instinctively and intuitively obvious to everyone today, but it's still an enormous jolt of freedom for someone who spent his first 30 years photographing in the expensive world of film.

The other wonderful thing about digital photography is the ability to crop, edit, tweak, and adjust the images. I have a rudimentary knowledge of Photoshop, and I should probably spend the time and energy to learn how to use it much more effectively; but for me, 90% of the improvement that I can make in my photos comes simply from cropping out the elements unrelated to my main subject. I know there's a lot of emotional debate about cropping, and all I can say is that after 30 years of living without a darkroom and without any personal capability to crop my images, I find the digital world of computerized post-production an enormous breath of fresh air...

I try to spend some time each day looking at other photographers' work here on Flickr, and I'm very grateful for the feedback and comments that people make about my own pictures. I could ramble on about various other aspects of what I like and dislike about cameras, Photoshop, and photography ... but I think that probably gives you as much information as you really need...