Outside the Children's Museum in Eau Claire, WI.

I hope, if I go on to become a zombie, people will mark my birthday with chintzy decorations.

I have a fair few fireworks pictures. It seems like a silly thing to take pictures of. I just think it's interesting how much different fireworks look in a photo. A photo is a visual sample of one moment in time but that moment often lasts much longer than the human eye/brain normally registers visually. In the time it took to expose this picture the fireworks left the ground, flew up in the air, exploded outward in every direction and fizzled. Watching it live we experience every part of that process seperately. Here it is as an aggregate. It is much different.

Broken sunlight? Check

Object extends closer than focus? Check

Find the bug? Check

If this plant were sticking out of the left hand side of the frame it'd be perfect.

This flower looks, to me, very much like a freshly molted insect drying its wings. Add the bizarre variegations and it looks alien.

If you showed a picture of this plant to a coral reef underwater that coral would probably have a really nightmarish view of what life above the water is like.

If you like variegated... fughettaboudit!!

These flowers, though pretty, do not look soft and light like flowers often do. They look like dense elastic skin to me.

Clemens or Munsinger. Don't recall which.

The pond outside the Como Conservatory, I think. What an interesting subsurface crack in the ice.

Inside the Como Conservatory, I believe. Maybe not.

If the colors were brighter, in this picture, I could almost convince myself it was part of the default backgrounds for Windows XP. Sadly, the colors are dull and in my projects folder it remains.

I don't think the fact that the foreground is out of focus hurts this picture one bit. In fact, I think if the focus was on the closest part of the flower the picture would be boring.

You know how your parents would say things to you like "You just wait until you have kids." or something similar to imply that you only disagree with them now but you'll feel differently when the tables are turned? Well if you relate to that I can only wish you my luck. On some level it makes my parents squirm that my child is so well behaved. They were hoping I'd have a terror as karmic payback. Jokes on you, grandparents!

This is one of my favorite pictures ever, hands down. As far as I'm concerned this is my master work and will remain the best picture I've ever taken until I get a picture of the meteor that kills us all just before impact.

This is an example of the kind of photo I often take for myself only. It's not framed perfectly or lit perfectly or perfectly exposed. I just found, and still find, the two tone flowers interesting. That's not why I took the picture, though. This picture belongs in a folder set I refer to as "find the bug."

You might be wondering, as well, why the branch always enters the picture on the left hand side. Why can't the branch come from the right hand side? Well, perhaps it has to do with lighting and the time of day I normally take photographs but I'm pretty sure it's just cause that's how I like it. My camera, my rules.

So, you are probably starting to wonder by now, what is with all the flipping trees? I like trees. What can I say. I like patterns on all scales and trees can always be counted on to provide some kind of interesting visual pattern.

I, after years, am still just as fascinated by how epic everything looks through a macro lens (or macro setting) as I was the first time.

I enjoy this picture greatly. Alas, like so many others that I feel really attached to I can't figure out why. What's good about this picture? I don't know but as far as I'm concerned it's suitable for framing.

This is not a flying buttress. A flying buttress is an external support for a building (oversimplification). However, if you asked someone who isn't an engineer, architect, or general nerd to draw a picture of a flying buttress the result, I think, would be much closer to this picture from underneath the 9th Ave. bridge between Sauk Rapids and St. Cloud than this, and actual flying buttress.

If I have a self portrait of myself that I hate does that make me an artist? Eddie Izzard spoke, in Dress To Kill, about being a virgin until later in life and how that was lame. He continued to theorize, however, that since he talks about it on stage that makes it cool, or him cool. I have a self portait that is lame and I hate it. That is lame. On the other hand I am now sharing it with the world. Does that make it cool, or me cool? Also, I've noticed that the winter in Ohio is warm enough compared to MN that there really isn't any advantage to letting the beard grow out. There's no point in having Chewbacca's armpit on your face if there's no 14 degree below zero wind trying to peel your face off. I still let it grow but it's not nearly as out of control as it is in this picture.

I'll have to go back real quick and check but I don't think I've gone off, yet, about how people seem to be afraid of negative space. Not every inch of a photograph or drawing or ... whatever... needs to be filled with something. And the subject doesn't need to be centered or perfectly distributed throughout the frame. I framed this picture just as it is on purpose when I shot it. I like it like this. I suppose I could tilt it a little since what I was aiming for was to have the top of his head run parallel with the top of the frame. I like this photo just how it is. The subject is all up in one corner and 2/3 of the picture is nothing but a sea of noise (well... mulch... but mulch is noisy in visual terms) and I still think it's perfect. I am floored by how huggably fierce a plastic dinosaur can look. His facial expression is rather vague. I don't know what emotion he is feeling but I know he is feeling AN emotion. I guess that's enough. How much pressure can you put on an inanimate object to emote?

Color is OK and black & white is GREAT but I really like sepia tone. It offers nearly all the attributes of a black and white photograph but with the added feature of being really warm and visually soft. Does that make sense?

That's my boy! I took this picture last November and I emailed it to my Dad. Somehow I've since lost the original file. As sad as I am about that I, at least, still had this lower resolution version in my gmail outbox.

This is one of them there digitally enhanced pictures you done heard the news man jawing about. Enhanced really isn't the right word. Dehanced? The original picture was in color but the color has been removed from all but the smallest circle around the wasps. I had turned the whole picture black and white to see how it would look and it struck me how much the apple looked like the moon. Then I thought it'd be cool to shop the wasps onto a picture of the moon as if the moon were being attacked by giant space bees. I never got that far. In fact, now, I think it'd be cooler as vector art (David Lanham anyone?) than a digitally altered photo.