The images have accumulated over the years since I bought my first camera, 1967. Most that will be posted are from the more recent past but what good are old photos if you don't make people look at them now and again. Besides back then they had the dramatic composition of an enthusiastic beginner and aggressive bad taste.

As I am a lazy photographer family is a strong theme. They are close at hand and suffer untold abuses as I point and shoot. For the most, they are snapshots. The photos not the family. I would like to think they sometimes go beyond, but the ones that you will see are just the ones that talk to me. Again, the photos not the family. Unfortunately they speak some language that I don't understand well enough to translate. I don't understand why the families I adopt keep moving either.

People will usually be shown at a distance. Generally, I like people but not enough to get close to them. These days it is also fairly consistent, that if I do get close enough to them to seem to be within speaking range then the photos end up out of focus. I must still want them at a distance because the focus always seems to be behind them. Jury's out pending an eye exam.

The rest are those things that don't move around a lot. Focusing, composing, exposing and generally drifting all consume a lot of time, so those are the subjects which appeal to me. Motionless objects give me the most consistent opportunity to perform all of those, focusing, composing, exposing and generally drifting things. Now if I could get the sun to slow down and the wind to stop blowing I'd have an excellent chance of making a sharp image. But, if I were really serious about this sharp photo stuff I'd wander around with a larger format camera.

Large format, however, means more weight and fewer photos per hour. Remember lazy. In addition to lazy, my philosophy is slightly less than rigorous. It is parallel to the thousand monkeys theory. The twist is that the monkeys only get one typewriter each whereas I get thousands of rolls of film. Neither the monkeys nor I are creating our novels digitally and, really, don't worry about the other inconsistencies between the two philosophies. For the most part (does it seem to you that I rarely say anything that doesn't imply an exception) the photos are derived from 35mm negatives or slides. Actually they are probably derived from Joe Vitone, Jay York, Greg Dyro, dozens of the great photographers of the past and hundreds of the new masters on the web. That of course goes without saying, yeah, so I said it anyway.

Now that the derivatives and attributions are taken care of, we can get back to digital. Me, not the monkeys. They are still typing away, proabably not even on Selectric. When I become rich and famous I will buy a copy of PhotoShop CS or DT or whatever incarnation it is in. I won't use it, of course. Learn new = work. For now I'll be sticking with Paint Shop Pro. (for just $59 dollars I can move up to Version 10 and get another couple fantastic photo fixing tools.) I'll take all the photo fixing I can get. Hallucinations are not real. Photographs are not real either but digitally altered photos may seem real. So it seems I can deal with a little reality, if it's digital. Novel, photo? A picture is worth a thousand words so when I finally take "that" photo I'll have my novel. Brevity is good.

Are you still confused? Philosophy to monkeys to photos as digital novels, did I mention that before? I didn't think so. Don't be concerned, as I've told a friend, this page contains the truth if not reality or logic. The truth, not "The Truth" as in the meaning of life kind of truth, but more the truth about what you've just read and at least 2% of the truth on this page may be true.

Don't you really wish that you'd skipped this whole zabout thing and just looked at the pretty pictures?