Eh! Wot? There really is nothing that describes this.

Photography

I got hooked on taking pictures way back in elementary school. We had a class field trip to a local science lab for a week and one of the activities was to develop our own pictures. I ran around with my dad's old manual Minolta camera snapping weird angles and pictures trying to get the best shot of the class. I didn't of course, but if I remember correctly I got some pretty nifty black and white photos out of it. I wonder whatever happened to them.

These days photography has become one of my favorite hobbies. I'm a big outdoors fan, so a lot of my stuff is from trips going hiking or camping. I still need to branch out more into other arenas like people and architecture, so living in a big city like San Diego is a big help there. I use a strange variety of cameras; my general every day use/casual camera is a Canon Powershot SD1000, while my "big boy" camera is a Sony DSLR-A100. I also make heavy use of my iPhone 3GS camera for grabbing quick and/or unique pictures.

Some of my various photo projects are:

I use SmugMug to sell prints of some of my better photos. It's not fancy but it does the job, and it has a very low markup. My galleries are at http://mikensandiego.smugmug.com/. If you see something you want to buy the original of (ie, this would be your picture exclusively), please email me via the sidebar About Me link and we can discuss pricing for purchasing originals.

The 365 Project is a neat little site that encourages you to take (or post) a picture every day. For me it's sort of like homework- it forces me to look at my every day world in a different way, looking for new and awesome shots. Lots of these are done with my iPhone 3GS camera, which is only a whopping 3MP. It forces me to pay more attention to composition and encourages macro-style close ups as the image resolution isn't good enough for far away detail. Unfortunately, like homework, I suck at keeping up with it. You can see my album here.

I'll be honest, I've let Flickr slide a lot in favor of Facebook. Flickr has become a big dumping ground for a lot of random photos I take as well as scouting type pics where I'm looking to setup for a good shoot with the DSLR. For friends / social events, most of those go to Facebook now instead of here. If you want to browse around you can find my Flickr profile here.