I very much enjoy photography and digitally enhancing the photos to create new art. My many subjects are Rural Decay, Down the Road, Farmers Markets, Small Town Main Streets, Windmills, Wind Giants, Landscapes, and whatever else catches my eye. My showcase covers many of these and even a few slide conversions of my parents in thier youth. Please feel free to browse my photo stream. All the pictures are copyrighted, but if you find something interesting for a good cause let me know, I can be very accommodating with thier use.

 

As you can see, many of my pictures are taken from the road. My wife doesn't ride well so I spend most of the time in the passenger seat when we travel. This has led to me become a photographic road warrior (or something close to that). We live in the American Midwest so most of my subjects come from scenes in the heartland.

 

To summarize the rest of this dialog below, My main camera is a Nikon D600 and a D80 (my first DSLR). My processing is done on a home build of a AMD Ryzen 7 (1st gen) with and AMD graphics card. The software is based on Gentoo Linux. My editing/workflow software is #Digikam for picture management throughout the entire process, then #LuminanceHDR to add the HDR effects to the raw pictures, next a short script using the #EXIFtool to add the EXIF data back on to the HDR, and finally #Darktable for the final processing. All are very good programs and in my opinion equivalent to the Photoshop universe. ( All three have a MS Windows version also). If you have any questions about any of this please message me and I'd be glad to comment/advise. Also, since the D600 has an issue with the sensor needing to be cleaned often I can offer what I've learned on that along the way.

 

UPDATE(1/21/22) I've updated this profile, see above. Current shutter count on the D600 is at 143K. #Darktable continues to evolve and is a very competent post processor and ready your photos for publishing. It will also handle file management and some HDR aspects, but I still like #Digikam and #LuminanceHDR for those functions.

Also, I have found a new sensor cleaning swabs made with microfiber that is my new best method to clean the sensor. The one I'm using can be found on Amazon and is SANHOOII. They are inexpensive so the one use and pitch is not a problem. Use you favorite cleaning fluid. They even work well with Methanol that Nikon's uses. DISCLAIMER. As always with sensor cleaning, do your own research, know what your doing, be careful, and send it in to be cleaned if you are not knowledgeable or comfortable doing this. I'm just passing on what I have found to work well for me, it may not work for you and I'm NOT responsible for and damage you do to your camera).

 

UPDATE(11/14/21): Been working at retirement for the past two years now. I've been so busy, don't know how i had time to work before. This has been a great opportunity to engage my photography again. I've had thousands of pictures to sort through and process the gems. A couple months ago I pick up the camera for the first time in over a year. Many of the routes are the same as before, but it's amazing how the scenes have changed and how much of the rural decay is being permanently erased by fire and bulldozer. I've been out several times over the past couple of months and now the backlog of photos is close to 10k. Should help keep me busy this winter. Also hope to reevaluate my presets for Luminance HDR and Darktable to increase processing speed and through put.

 

UPDATE(5/16/20): Been absent from Flickr for a bit now with a heavy load at work, but the COVID has "Eliminated My Position". Not sure if this is retirement yet or not, but I do have a bit of free time on my hands that I haven't had for a long time. So as to not go stir crazy, I've started processing the photos I've take over the last several years. There are about 30-40K of captures to go through so you will be seeing a bit of me and my photos.

 

I'm still using Linux and all Open Source software. It's amazing how far these programs have come. My primary tools are Digikam to keep the pictures organized and Flickr uploading, Luminance HDR to inject a bit of pizzazz into the shot, and Darktable, the real workhorse that brings my captures to thier polished finish. I have six primary presets for Luminance HDR and every capture is processed in all six. There are 6 matching presets in Darktable the generates my first cut at the final processing. From the six I will choose one that best fits my liking and mood and apply any additional Darktable tweeks to finish. Note that you don't need to have a Linux box to run these programs today. All three will run on a Windows 10 machine. I have these installed on my Windows 10 laptop that I take on the road and they work equally well on that machine. If anyone has more interest in how I process my photos please let me know and I can dive into more detail. You can also checkout the link below. I've done some blogging on Tumblr about some of the photos, and how I approach both the capture and subsequent processing.

  

UPDATE(4/2/17): Been busy at everything... need to get back to processing. I may not have been posting much the past couple of years, but that doesn't mean I not hitting the road with the camera. We have more of the Tucson and Farmers Market to work through, along with an Southwest Minnesota and Western Iowa trip last summer (hunted down a few round and unique barns) and our trip this spring through Missouri and Arkansas. (probably a total of 30k of shots to sort through).

 

The big news this week and what's got me in front of the screen again is the addition of a new 4K 27" monitor. This is a must have for anyone who is processing in volume and and needs a lot of premium work space. I'ts given me the visual clarity and detail to process at a much faster rate than I have in the past. If that old monitor is getting to be drag on your eyes, checkout the new 4K. Price is becoming more reasonable and they are showing up on more showroom shelves.

 

UPDATE (4/24/17): Been working way too hard and not having much time for the Art, I decided to fix that a bit. Work is not going to slow up, so I needed to process much faster. Ergo, the Zen Box was build. The system I designed and built has taken my Linux photo processing capacity to the next level. It's base on a water cooled Ryzen 1800X processor mounted on an ASRock X370 MB . The system drive is on a Samsung NVMe ssd set to it's full potential (OS boot time to KDE is about 15 sec). The working drive to process the photos is a striped raid on a HighPoint Rocket Raid controller card. The hardware raid currently host five ssd's and is planned to total eight when finished (waiting for the next credit cycle). To finish the system and stay with the AMD spirit, the graphics is powered by an 8G RX480 card from MSI.

 

Batch processing the HDR now takes 1/4 the time as it did in the past. The previous system would take about 30 hr to process 350 captures into 6 tone mapped variants for each capture. Now it only takes 7 hrs. I still have some fine tuning to do on the system, but I'm VERY pleased with the results so far.

 

UPDATE (8/28/13): The new camera has just arrived and I can't wait to start shooting. This will be my primary camera from here on out. I have just purchased a full frame Nikon D600. I know there have been some issues with dirt, but it works out of it soon enough and I've had extensive sensor cleaning training with my D80 that I can't shoot above F10. The new camera was kitted with a 28 to 300mm Nikor VR lens. Enery thing will be twice the size and twice the fun. Stay tuned. (note: this will be my Christmas and B-Day present for about the next ten years.)

 

For a computer I have a quad core i7 with 32G ram, an SSD work drive, and lots of HD space.

 

Software is all Linux based running the latest kernels and KDE. The main packages are Digikam for organizing my photos and the GIMP, Darktable, Luminance HDR, and Krita, for post processing.