Post 1 - Buddha Fish

Fair Warning: I'm notorious for setting up new blogs, actively posting for extended periods of time and then -- POOF! -- no more posts for a good long time or forever.

In 2003 I kept a War Journal going for sometime, but that started to drive me really nuts.  I read a lot of news and political blogs, and that's okay, but when I started doing the work to keep up my own it just started to bum me out.

For a while I maintained another blog called "Is That How Jesus Drives?"  No, not What Would Jesus Drive, but how.  It was inspired by the fact that I live in an area of the country where people love to wear their religion on their car and truck bumpers, but then they drive as maniacally as everybody else, so I often wonder if those are the kinds of values they learn about in church (3 times a week for some).  Alas, researching the hypocrisies of dogma bums me out, too.

So I deleted those first two blogs and started another one which is, ostensibly, about screenwriting and soundtrack music.  That one's still around, but I haven't posted to it in over a year now.

But recently I bought a great digital SLR.  A Pentax K10D.  I love it.  It's the second good camera I've owned in my life and it's my first digital camera.  Back in the '70s I had a Pentax Spotmatic SLR.  I got it while I was still in high school, had fun shooting pictures and developing my own black & white prints in a darkroom down in the basement of my parent's house.  I was just beginning to get pretty good at it when I moved to Chicago during my college years, and my camera was stolen within my first week or so of arriving in town.  After that, I only had a few point-and-shoots and a Polaroid to amuse myself with, but it was never quite the same.

I've been an avid Photoshop user since 1991 and have spent countless thousands of hours tweaking and manipulating images from scanned and downloaded sources, mostly for amusement.  When digital photography first became popular, I discovered all the things I didn't like about many of the cameras available and the pictures they took, primarily from photos gained from others.  Conversations about Mega-pixels aren't particularly my bag, but I really hated it when I found a nice image I wanted to blow-up to a decent size and found that I couldn't because the pixel data was just to sparse.  So I continued to put off even looking for a camera of my own until 10 Mega-pixels became common and reasonably affordable.

So now I've got one and I'm having a blast with it, trying to make up for the 30 year gap since my last good camera was stolen.

In just the last few weeks I've taken loads of photos right in my own backyard.  In particular, around a little pond we have that we call our Buddha Pond, in which there now lives three fish we call our Buddha Fish.  There used to be four, but I'll write about that later.

Shooting pix of the pond at night and the fish during the day has given me lots of good practice as I learn my way around my new camera.  And, finally, after 17 years, the photos I'm tweaking and printing with Photoshop are my own.  

So maybe there's some good blog material here.  I will make no promises, but, as always, I certainly intend to keep this going for a while.