My DNA




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Note: A large percentage of my "landscape" photos are now copyright-protected, and are not available for downloads and free use. You can view them here in Flickr, but if you would like prints, enlargements, framed copies, and other variations, please visit my SmugMug gallery by clicking here.

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My "day job" is in the IT profession, where I work as an expert witness, consultant, author, and conference speaker; 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 300+ photos that were published in various blogs, magazines, newspapers, etc. during the 2008-2009 period, I've collected them all in this Flickr set; the 1,300+ photos that I published in 2010 are in this Flickr set; the 1,300+ photos that were published in 2011 are in this Flickr set; the 1,090 photos published in 2012 are in this Flickr set; and the 350+ photos published thus far in 2013 are in this Flickr set. During the last few years, these photos have been published in such places as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Forbes, Time/CNN, New York Observer, New York magazine, Wired News, and Huffington Post.

A large percentage of my "landscape" photos are now copyright-protected, and are not available for downloads and free use. You can view them here in Flickr, but if you would like prints, enlargements, framed copies, and other variations, please visit my SmugMug gallery at www.yourdon.smugmug.com.

How did all this get started? Well, after being frustrated by cheap point-and-shoot cameras 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 of New York City. 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 few years ago, I got my first DSLR -- a Nikon D50 -- and gradually moved up the line to a D70, D80, D300, D700, and now a D5100 with video capability, together with a Sony Alpha a65 SLT camera. I've got a handful of lenses, but the one I use most often is a VR 18-200mm zoom on the D5100 and an 18-250 zoom lens for the Sony A65, and sometimes a wider-angle zoom, and a fixed-length 50mm f/1.4 lens for low-light situations. And I've got a Nikon P7700 and Canon SD95 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 the situation has improved noticeably in the past few months, with the much-improved camera on Apple's iPhone5 -- which has an 8-megapixel sensor, an f/2.8 lens, and amazing capabilities to handle panorama and HDR.)

My Flickr archives contain 5,000 photos, starting some local Greenwich Village photos that I took in the spring of 1969. There are over 340 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, and which don't appear in the Flickr archives at all.

I've started taking photography classes and workshops during the past few years, 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...