Welcome to my new photography site. Please check out the Welcome Gallery and stay tuned for portfolios and new galleries that will be added. This page is where you will find blog posts about my photography travels and adventures.
I am thrilled to announce that the image above won for Best Print of the Year at the 2024 convention of the Columbia Council of Camera Clubs (4Cs) this past September. I was a member of the Oregon Coast Photographers Association (OCPA) until I left Oregon for Arizona in May, and the OCPA is one of over two dozen clubs that comprise 4Cs, which covers the Pacific Northwest, from northernmost Northern California, Oregon and Washington, over to Idaho.
I really enjoyed my two and a half years of involvement with the OCPA, which is a remarkably active camera club, meeting twice a month for competitions and other events, based in Coos Bay, Oregon. And although I had to miss the 4Cs Convention this year, it was wonderful the prior year in The Dalles, Oregon, where I not only met some great photographers from around the Pacific Northwest, but also won for best black and white print of the year, as well as several honorable mentions for photos that had won OCPA competitions the preceding 12 months.
The image is one I took during a full day of shooting at Bodie State Historical Park in Northern California, the largest and best preserved mining era ghost town in the country. I was there September 30, 2023, one of the two days of the year that Bodie is open all day for photographers, and was planning to shoot night photography at the end of the day. A snowstorm rolled in, though, as it started to get dark, so I had to leave earlier than planned to ensure I didn’t get stuck up there in the snow. The impending storm did make for a magnificent changing sky, full of dramatic clouds, throughout the day. The image that has most stayed with me, however, was this poignant interior shot showing the windows and remains of drapery in a home that feels stuck in time.
If you’ve never been to Bodie State Historical Park, I strongly recommend it. There were once over 2,000 structures in the town, whose brief boom during California’s Gold Rush started in 1881. Thanks to the well preserved state of the homes and other structures left behind, a visitor can get a vivid sense of what life was like in those times. I have a gallery here of two dozen more images from that day’s shooting.