About This Site
Hi, and welcome! Discoveries is the online home for my photos, and a blog mostly about photography expeditions — although anything I’m thinking about is fair game. If you’re interested, here is a little info about me, the site, and the tools I am using to put it all together. For any questions or corrections (I am always happy to correct bird identifications!), contact me. And if you want to receive email updates when there is new content posted, you can subscribe.
I live in Portland, Oregon. I’m retired, an ex-employee of UC Santa Barbara and an ex-resident of that beautiful city. I spend my time with my family, in the garden, playing and listening to music, volunteering with elders, and exploring the Pacific Northwest. I’ve carried a camera with me for many years, but since moving to Portland I’ve been working on improving my photography skills, documenting my explorations, and more recently, learning about birds, their habitats, and how to take their pictures.
My Cameras
My current camera is a Sony RX10-iv, and I am very happy with it. It has a fixed lens, with long reach (24-600mm equivalent), good light sensitivity (max. apperture of F2.4-4.0), and fast focusing.
My previous camera was a Sony a6500, with a kit zoom lens and a prime 35mm equivalent lens. In some ways, on the spec sheet that was a better camera (e.g., the 4/3″ sensor). I really liked shooting with the prime lens; the 35mm format created a very human scale image. But once bird photography became a specific goal, I found the kit zoom to be lacking, in reach and image quality. I looked into purchasing a lens appropriate for birding, but the investment would have been more than the cost of the RX10, and I was already going nuts lugging around multiple lenses and trying to quickly swap for different images. In order to keep photography from getting in the way of my hiking and exploring, I opted for the all-in-one “bridge camera” approach, and it has worked well for my needs. It is still a better camera than I am a photographer, so I get to keep learning, which is also part of the fun for me.
There are a few photos on this site that date back even earlier than the a6500, using a Panasonic Lumix, and before that a Canon SureShot. I also have a few scans of old photo prints. There might be a few phone camera shots here too, but I generally haven’t used my phone for photography.
This Web Site
This is site built on the current version of WordPress (6.5 as of this writing), using the Twenty-Twentythree theme, hosted at Dreamhost. I’ve tried to keep the site design simple from the visitor’s perspective. I had previously set up a site hosted at WordPress.com, but my need for more storage space for the images and a couple of plug-ins to support photo organization and my work flow pushed me into a plan that was way more expensive than this approach.
I’ve put in a lot of effort into the workflow behind the scenes. I am using two plug-ins: wp/lr, and Foo Gallery. The first links up Lightroom with my WordPress site, managing the synchronization of photos that appear as Collections in Lightroom and as photo albums in the WordPress Media Library. At that point, Foo Gallery can access the photos, and create galleries based on metadata such as keywords. So the workflow is: I develop a photo in Lightroom, tag it with keywords that include it in the appropriate Smart Collection, publish that Smart Collection to WordPress, and then use it in galleries just like any other media. Other metadata is also synchronized, so I can caption in Lightroom and have that text appear with the photos online without any additional steps. And once a gallery has been set up, I can update it just using tags in Lightroom. My hope is that all the effort up front will make it easy to keep the web site current. If you’re interested in more info, drop me an email.
Other Info Resources
Locations mentioned in captions and blog posts
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