I guess, photography is my main hobby, followed closely by travel and exercise. I do travel a lot. Mostly on business, but for fun as well. I have been to about 80 countries and counting. Still have a lot to go before I see them all. I don't discriminate in the types of photography I do: landscapes, citiscapes, macro, candids, portraits, underwater, nature, dogs, flowers, birds, colors, textures, lights, HDR... I love them all and like to switch from one to another.

I shoot mostly Nikon. I used to shoot mostly Canon during the film days, but used Nikon for my underwater photography. My first DSLR was Canon - D30. But soon after that I made a decision to switch to Nikon all the way, so I do not have to carry two sets of equipment as I travel - Nikon for underwater and Canon for topside. At that time Nikon was clearly better underwater - better housings, more available, etc. So, I switched to Nikon. Now I have most Nikon bodies, both DX and FX and most Nikon lenses. I shoot mostly FX, and when my wife Natasha comes with me to photo shoots, she shoots DX. Underwater I shoot Nikon D3, D3S, D4, D800 in Subal and Aquatica housings, with Inon and Sea & Sea strobes. Topside, in addition to Nikon, just for fun and special occasions I occasionally shoot my Leica M with Noctilux 50 mm f/0.95. This is a truly special set-up, tough to handle if you are spoiled by the fast AF in Nikons, like I am, but it produces amazing results. If you are lucky enough to get the manual focus just right with Nocti fully open. The DoF is razor-thin and you can really draw attention to the subject you want. I have some of those images on Flickr in the Las Vegas wedding collection and some pictures of Austin, my grandson.

I have been shooting for at least 50 years ( I guess I am dating myself), and in the early days used to do all of my own processing - dark room and all. Can't imagine how, but I did. Digital photography was made for me. I switched immediately and never looked back. Although I can probably still find my old Nikon F5, that I used in Subal housing to produce great slides from my diving adventures. I have been using Lightroom since it first came out and Photoshop since v.2. I use Photomatix Pro for HDRI, Topaz and onOne suites for plug-ins in LTRM and PS. I love post-processing and just smile politely at people that still believe that the image cannot be touched since it was shot. I guess there are fewer and fewer of those left. But I could never understand that logic. To me, you express yourself creatively in a variety of ways, post most certainly being one of them.

I joined Flickr about 3 years ago, but never used it seriously. Just uploaded a few images and forgot about that. I paid a little more attention to my photography website www.michaelbleyzer.com on SmugMug, but not much more. It is still active, although I stopped uploading new images to it a while ago. I probably have a few hundred images there, and some overlap now with what I have on Flickr, but not all. Still, out of some 500,000 images I accumulated over 50 years of shooting that's a very small sample.

But over the last 3 months I got more and more addicted to Flickr. Unlike SmugMug - Flickr has much more social interaction between fellow photographers. And I like that. So, I started posting more images on Flickr and adding them to various groups. I got about 100,000 views over the last 3 months, I had almost none before that. But I also discovered that some people here have 1,000,000 views or 2,000,000 views or more. That's impressive.

It is interesting that I also found that I like some images from people that have relatively few views and do not necessarily like all images from people with a lot of views. Sometimes I even wonder how an image that seems OK, but nothing that special to me, accumulated that many views. Don't know, but I guess it is a matter of opinion and taste. But it does not really matter. What matters is that there are so many people here that obviously love photography and are willing to spend time posting their pictures, promoting them, and interacting with other photographers. And that's great!

View my pictures that I like: www.flickr.com/photos/mbfirefly/sets/72157645432600023/