One of the results of my Sony F717's CCD dying was I that I started shooting film again.  This led me to look for gear on Ebay that I could use to augment my camera.  Not suprisingly, there is a brisk business online of folks selling compatible equipment.  There are many lenses, flashes, and power winders available.

I bought a little power winder a couple of weeks ago.  I haven't had much of a chance to dicker with it, but today I'm heading to Mount Rushmore National Park.  I'll bring both my digital and my film camera and set down to take shots in the park.  Hopefully the winder ends up being a valuable/useful tool.

I am on my way to Rapid City, SD for the annual gathering of Western States Folklorists. Normally this meeting takes place somewhere in the in the West. This year the meeting is in the Midwest and Folklorists form the MidWest have been invited to participate.

WESTAF supports this gathering each year and sends a representative. This year, that person happens to be me. I will be doing a little presentation of The Ties That Bind web site that I've been working on. The site has a few cleanup items, but is for the most part complete. I'll also be doing a workshop on Monday on Web 2.0.

I take at least one photo a day and send it to Flickr.  Often that picture is taken from my cell phone, a Treo 650, and soon after sent to flickr via a special email address set up to accept photos and plop them into my photo stream.  Flickr then automatically adds my preset tags making them findable.  It is pretty slick and works very well with an Internet enabled phone.

The problem is that you end up being relegated to using whatever camera you have in your phone and while some phones with cameras take stellar pictures, you have very little control over the settings in the camera.  You sacrifice control for convenience/instant gratification.

My Sony digital camera went on the blink today. I had a Kodak that did the same thing a number of years ago. I sighed and resigned myself to the fact it was time for a new digital camera. I have a fair number of accessories for this camera, so it had me pretty bummed out.

This camera has been a real workhorse for me. I've taken well over 5000 pictures with it. It has great optics. It has been a pretty steady friend.

I have no idea of how many images have been captured on Flickr. Suffice it to say the numbers have to be insanely large.

Getting Views...I recently started submitting images to different groups. In a very short time, my views had more than doubled. Makes sense because when you participate in a topical way, those interested in the same topic will tend to cluster.

Stock is it dead?...I don't think the world of stock photography is quite dead. Still, it seems that with the vast number of photographs on Flickr, many running under a CC license, it seems to me that the stock industry has be troubled.

I took this shot of a dried yucca flower yesterday when hiking around my brother-in-law's house. He lives beside some rough park space with a fabulous view of Pikes Peak when you hike to the top of a hill. I created a photo set on Flickr with quite a few shots of the landscape.

I added about 300 photos to Flickr today. They are older photos of Vancouver, the Dogs, Butterflies, and an old truck. This brings my flickr