At the base of Ayers Rock, just after sunrise.

****************************************************

FOUR SCORE AND SEVEN YEARS AGO...
I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, but have spent my last 33 years in Mystic, Connecticut. Before my retirement in 1993, I taught high school French to a bunch of kids who didn't really want to learn it. Fun! I did this for 28 years. If you are looking for the reason for my basic insanity, look no further.

These days I do only what I WANT to do! This includes travel, computers, photography, and sailing.

My interest in photography never really went beyond "point and shoot" until I retired. Then, with each vacation we would take, I would find myself trying to compose better and better pictures. In 1998 I finally broke down and bought a Canon Rebel G. Our SE Asia trip was its first real outing.

The real turning point was just three years ago (almost to the day) when Charley bought me the Olympus D-450 Z (a logical choice because of my love for both computers and photography) for my 55th birthday. I initially had mixed feelings about this, as I knew digital photography was still very young, and I didn't know how well such a device would travel.

In March we went to Egypt. I took both the Rebel G and the Olympus, thinking that I would use the Oly mainly for people photography, the Rebel G for the rest. As it turned out, the digital was so much fun, and the pictures turned out so well that I used it more and more. So, for the next two trips, I would take both cameras, but by the fall of 2000, I was hardly using the Rebel G at all. I left it at home!

I really loved the D-450 Z, but missed my polarizer, which I had used almost constantly on the Canon, and the freedom to change settings. And I wanted more zoom! So when the UZ was introduced, I watched and waited. I knew it would not be too long before the price dropped like a rock. I was willing to wait until September of 2001. As it turned out, I didn't have to wait that long. I bought mine in March, 2001.

But even before I bought the UZ, I found this group. What a gold mine of information and good advice, not to mention friendly, congenial people. As some leave, others take their places, but the same atmosphere of helpfulness and good will prevails. This seems almost too good to be true.

And it has interested me in taking pictures locally, whereas in the past, I had taken them only in exotic, far-away places. The POTW has been great in getting all of us out to look for imaginative aspects of our own surroundings.

My website

My PBase Galleries