That’s where I am…. Street 101. Went to a farmstand with a friend today and did some “street” shooting. Sony A7R6 with the Sigma 14-24mm f/2.8 Art. Wish I had the 28-70mm instead. This is the best image that I got, but I’m really happy with it. You can see movement in the strawberries that she’s holding while her stare is locked on the camera. Small victories.
Times are a'changing
For the regular visitors to my site (do I have any? lol…), you will notice a bunch of changes to the website. I am currently in the process of extensively revising my website to both update it and make it more appealing to the audiences that I want to attract. Hoping that it looks more professional. I would really appreciate any feedback in the comments.
I'm doing it!
I have always wanted to be a travel photographer, especially for an organization such as National Geographic. I have always wanted to travel and see distant lands, and do what I love the most; take photos. Well, I have decided to make that happen!
Next year, in 2027, I will be traveling to Japan! It has been a life-long dream of mine to make this trip, and I finally got up the nerve to go ahead with it. I will be taking a private tour of Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka with a stop by Mount Fuji along the way. In all, I will spend twelve days in Japan taking photos of everything, from anime and manga to Nintendo World, Temples and Shrines. It is going to be an amazing adventure! I will finally be cutting my teeth as a travel photographer!
I look at other peoples’ work on YouTube and greatly admire not only their photography, but also their force of will to get out there and do what they want to do, and I am doing that for myself. Instead of admiring from a distance and dreaming the big dream, I am motivating myself to do it! And I am so excited!
On another note, last week I posted my second YouTube video about what’s in my camera bag 2026, digital version, featuring my Hasselblad X2D-ii camera. Below is the link for the video:
big BIG changes and 180 shift!
So, in my last post, I described my manual camera system and how I was tired with digital. Well, thats changed.
I’ve decided to get back into digital format, ditching the analog for awhile. I am so happy, I was able to get my hands on a Hasselblad X2D-II medium-format camera! And simply from the elegant boxing of everything to just playing around with it - I haven’t had time to get out and shoot yet, in the throes of moving - I love everything about it! The menus and controls are so intuitive, it makes it very easy to use, and I cannot wait to get out and take some photographs hopefully this week with the nice weather.
Considering I’ll be working with ginormous files - 100 MB before editing - I did pick up a Mac Studio with starting-off 2 terabytes of hard-drive space. If things progress, I’d love to set up a network in my home with like 4TB of storage. But we’ll see what happens. I am also considering a pro printer to print my photographs if I should get some nice ones.
That’s all for now. I will try and keep my blog updated more frequently, at least for myself being about to record my thoughts about my photographic journey. I don’t know if anyone is reading this, but hopefully so.
Taking Pics and Camera Gear
Yesterday and today I finally got the opportunity to shoot some photos with my new camera. I went to a couple of local cemeteries to look for some interesting shots; one cemetery abuts my property, so I just need to walk out my backdoor and I’m there! One especially interesting shot was a Civil War section in the West Lawn Cemetery in Canto, OH. I hope those images come out looking good. I am going to another architecturally interesting one on Friday, the Glendale Cemetery in West Akron. I shot mostly with the Nikon 28mm today.
My gear kit is also fully set up. In addition to the Nikon F-2 Photomic that I have, I also acquired the following Nikon lenses: 28mm f/2.8 lens; 50mm f/1.4 lens; 85mm f/2 AI-S lens and; 200mm f/4 Micro AI-S lens. I also picked up some original Nikon lens hoods, camera body caps, and lens caps. For some creativity, I got color filter set from Tiffen, as well as a no. 12 Yellow filter. I also picked up a Sekonic L-308 X-U light meter. For a camera bag, I chose retro and got a Domke F-6 waxed canvas camera bag (my first professional camera bag in the 1970s was the original Domke F-2 bag).
It’ s my eventual goal to develop my own film, and possibly make prints at some point. I have a second bathroom, which can hopefully be made lightproof. Then it’s a matter of getting an enlarger and chemicals, trays and stuff to do my own printing.
Another thing that is going to happen at some point is changing this website. I’m overly happy with the design, and I will likely go with something more retro to match my black and white work.
Choosing a camera bag
For anyone trying to find the best camera bag, my advice is forgetaboutit! There is no perfect, one bag to rule them all. I should know by now; I spent the last three weeks looking at dozens of YouTubes and visiting too many websites to count looking for the perfect bag, and my discovery, other than that I really like bags? There is no perfect bag and there is no one bag for everything.
The first bag I started out with, storing my new camera gear, was the Tenba DNA 13 messenger bag. The Tenba DNA 13 is a solid photographer’s messenger bag, with the ability to hold lots of gear in a smaller form factor than Tenba’s DNA 16 Pro. It held all of my gear and then some, right up until the point that I ordered the OM System 100-400mm f/5.0-6.3 IS II telephoto zoom. With this, unfortunately, the bag wouldn’t do for a complete carry-all. So, I started searching for another bag, one that would absorb all of my gear, and hopefully have some room for extras.
As a result of all my YouTube watching, I decided to go for a backpack, as these bags typically are great for telephoto lenses and have lots of storage capacity. I went back to YouTube to search for best backpacks of 2025, and started watching more YouTubes. Two backpacks stood out: the PGYTech OnePro Focux 25L pack and the Summit-Creative Tenzing 25L zippered pack. I ended up buying the PGYTech backpack.
The PGYTech OnePro Focux bag is a very nice backpack, and I really did love it. It is constructed very well, is easily sizable, and huge. It lists at 25L, but the backpack seems noticeably larger than that, think 30-35L. It seems to want to fit DSLRs or mirrorless cameras with battery grips attached, huge cameras that otherwise might struggle with other bags. It seems perfect of a system built around either the Nikon Z-9, or Canon EOS R-1. I put all of my current camera gear in the backpack, and when I put on the pack, my gear seemed to shift around badly, especially my camera. Although it has velcro straps to secure gear in its respective cubby hole, the pack’s dividers are quite wide, leaving in my estimation about 3 inches of unusable space. This of course is great if you stack your lenses vertically rather than horizontally. In the end, although I really did love the bags construction and features - it has a space battery holder with indicators of whether the battery is charged or not - in the end it was simply way too big for me.
The bag that I did finally go with is the Shimoda Action X30 Women’s backpack with a large mirrorless core unit. Pics of the backpack below:
The women’s pack has special straps that s-curve at the chest, providing for a better fit for women. It’s a really comfortable fit, unique among photography backpack manufacturers. The Shimoda Action X30 is just a great pack, it contains all of my gear and then-some, and has an expandable opening on top to store even more stuff, like a rain jacket or hoodie. It comes with a raincover and a helmet holder. Although I haven’t taken the backpack out into the wild yet, I love it already. I feel the Shimoda Action X30 pack is the best photography backpack on the market currently.
My photographic influencers
There were several photographers that influenced me early on as a teen, growing up in Massachusetts but summering in Maine. One such photographer is Peter Hornby, whom I used to hang with as an early teen while on summer in Ocean Park, Maine. I stayed with my grandmother every summer at this environmentally rich speck of land along the Maine coast, while Peter stayed with his grandparents, the Hotchkisses. At the time, I was using a Canon F-1N, all the while dreaming about having a Nikon, which I couldn’t quite afford, and what drew me to Peter, despite our shared hobby, was the fact that he did have Nikons, which he let me handle and take some pics with. Every day, Peter would ride his black bike down to the beach, camera in hand, and many times I would meet him and we would take photographs together. Peter was a very quiet person, we never talked much, but we allowed our love of photography to be our bond. I grew to love his photos of Ocean Park, memorialized on postcards in the Ocean Park Gift Shop, and I tried to duplicate his techniques and sense of vision.
Another local photographer that had a significant influence on me was the late Edith O. Stephenson. Ms. Stephenson, a lifelong resident of Ocean Park, lived at the very end of a street and, as luck would have it, had a salt marsh in her very backyard. This elicited a love of both nature, and photography, for me, one that would be lifelong to this day. Ms. Stephenson taught me how to photograph birds, she with her Pentax SP-1000, and I with the very same camera, my first SLR. She was adept at bird photography way before it was a thing as it is today, and many modeled for her in her backyard; ibises, herons, egrets, ducks, warblers. These were memorialized on a wall in her den, where she displayed her various photographs. She also taught me the ways of birding in my formative years, and we would be up at dawn and out in the marshes of Scarborough looking for herons. I owe a lot to her for her teaching and stewardship.
One professional photographer that I admired greatly was the late Peter Turner, an American contemporary photographer. I first discovered Pete in Photography Magazine back in the mid-1970’s. He was known for some very vibrant and abstract photographs, and was a very early influence on my photography, my having tried to emulate his artworks. Pete Turner’s works can be found at Pete Turner Photography.
The last photographer who was a major influencer to me is the late Galen Rowell. Galen was an adventure photographer, having traversed virtually all corners of the earth for that perfect shot, his glacier and mountain work being among the most spectacular. He also was a photographer representative for Nikon cameras, always testing the latest gear in the field for Nikon. His work has influenced my landscape and nature imaging ever since I discovered him in Photography Magazine as well. He wrote a wonderful book in 1993 titled Galen Rowell's Vision: The Art of Adventure Photography. Sadly, he and his wife were killed in a plane crash in 2002. Unfortunately, Galen Rowell’s Mountain Light Photography website has been taken down.
