About my photography

I've been a casual photographer most of my life, but started to get more interested while working as a web developer at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism in the 2000s, sharing an office with photojournalist Ken Light and sitting in on sessions with photojournalism professor Richard Koci-Hernandez, who suggested shooting an image every day. I got hooked, and did Photo-a-Day in 2011, 2014, and 2017. But it wasn't until Steven Bollman suggested I check out the Fujifilm system, and I started hiking with (and enjoying the photography of) naturalist Ward Ruth that I got passionate about it. When the pandemic hit, I finally(!) learned manual exposure and started carrying cameras everywhere.

I love to hike, love to travel, and I love cycling. And I'm fortunate to live in the SF Bay Area, which is so rich with both natural beauty and the leftovers of the Built World -- shipyards, old buildings, fascinating people. The cameras became an essential ingredient, and I mostly stopped shooting iPhone. I get out lots, and document my experiences, that's all.

About this site

No images have been uploaded to this site!

As a photography portfolio site, this one is a bit unique. Yes, I wanted a place apart from social media to display my favorite work. But I already put a lot of time into uploading, titling, describing and tagging my images on Flickr. I wanted a way to leverage that work into a customized portfolio site, without re-uploading. Flickr provides a well-documented API, and I wondered whether I could build a gallery that pulled images in directly without hosting them itself. Of course I had to build it in Django, because that's what I do.

If you're curious, I've made a short video explaining the architecture of this site:

I'm calling the this project "Tangelo" (for no particular reason), and it's open source. If you speak Python/Django and use Flickr, you're free to use/customize (or contribute code!). Otherwise, it's probably not suited for most photographers.

Tangelo source code

Posted, No Trespassing

I'm shacker on Flickr (on Instagram too). I also post occasionally to Twitter, and still have a blog at blog.birdhouse.org.

But wait...

Q: I heard that Flickr was a ghost town.

A: Not for me! Me and millions of others are having a great old time, and the image quality and feature-set is way beyond what you get with Instagram. You might want to read my Medium piece Flickr Is No Ghost Town