Photo sharing: SmugMug

As we live some distance (over 190 miles) from my hometown, whenever we visit I almost always bring my camera along so I can document the events and lives of our extended family of friends and relatives. Sometimes they get annoyed with my shutterbug, but everyone always enjoys looking through our photo albums. While I have a lot of fun being group photographer for our friends and family, my true love in photography is the scenic or nature shot. There is just something about the thrill of lining up a perfect shot, no matter if it is something bold and dramatic like the Sydney Opera House, or something as simple as a moss covered log in the soft sunlight of the late afternoon. Sometimes I can barely manage to drive to work without my "kodak senses" tingling like crazy and demanding that I stop and take a picture of a clump of wild flowers or a particularly interesting interplay of sunlight and shadows on a bed of reeds along the river.

My photography history

My first camera was a Christmas present from my parents in 1995. This wonderful gift of black plastic and glass introduced me to what has become one of my great loves in life: amateur photography. My friends and family knew I was hooked when I took seven rolls of film during a two-day road trip across Vermont in 1997. By the time the camera died during our 2000 trip to the Maine coast (the lens gears were damaged on a hike up {or more correctly, a fall down} Mount Battie), it had taken about 2500 photos over the course of four and a half years. I felt like I had lost an old friend when it died.

A Cannon SureShot Classic 120 was my second (and final) 35mm camera. Purchased during the summer of 2000, it has held up like a real trooper. Not only does its brushed alloy shell look sleek and sexy, but it also takes a damn fine picture under some of the worst conditions I could come up with. As an example of its rugged dependability, it took about 2000 photos during our four week trip to Australia in 2002, with locations as diverse as on helicopters, planes, trains, busses, 4WD trucks, camel back, in the desert, on the ocean, in tropical rainforests, on mountains, and in caves ... and it never once gave us a spot of trouble!

Seeing the mammoth film processing bill from our Australia trip, for Christmas 2002 my parents gave me a Sony CyberShot 3.2 mega pixel digital camera. At first I was very reluctant to move off of my beloved 35mm camera, but after a seven month transition period, I had mostly made the switch to digital. With the birth of our son in 2003 and the eventual purchase of a significantly larger memory card, my photography habit (as my wife calls it) exploded! On a four day vacation to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario with my high school friends and our families, I took 330 photos. During a five and a half day business trip to Tulsa, Oklahoma, I took 260 pictures. My love of digital photography knew no limit!

However all good things must come to an end, and in the spring of 2006 after a mere 3.5 years and 7085 photos, my trusty CyberShot died of a busted lens gear after it was inadvertently dropped to the ground while taking photos of my kids running around playing at a neighbourhood bonfire. Now I was in a real quandary; for the first time in over a decade I was camera-less. And since I have three kids now, we cannot just drop a couple of hundred dollars on getting a new camera. I had no idea what to do. Eventually my wife suggested that I get a new one. The conversation went something like this:

Julie: "Why don't you go buy a new camera."
Dustin M.: "We cannot afford it."
Julie: "You have been moping around the house ever since the old one died. Just go and buy one."
Dustin M.: "Where would we get the money?"
Julie: "Take it out of the vacation budget."
Dustin M.: "But we are saving for our 10th wedding anniversary trip..."
Julie: "It's not like you would be any fun to travel with if you couldn't take pictures."
Dustin M.: "But ... "
Julie: "Just buy the damn camera!!"

And so I did. We are now the proud owners of an 8 mega pixel Canon PowerShotS80! It is the digital big brother of my last 35mm camera, and has heaps of fantastic features! Best of all, its battery is rated for about 200 photos per charge and the 2GB memory chip will hold over 550 pictures at the maximum resolution (over 17,000 at the lowest), so I will no longer have to "holdback" on my photography hobby! In fact, on the day of Maggie and Zoë's first birthday party, I took 122 pictures.

Local albums

Here are pictures of some of the interesting people and places in our life. The following topically organized galleries are made up of both pictures taken with our digital camera, and scanned photos selected from our dozens of 35mm photo albums.

• Various Zanesville Group Photos of our friends back in my home town
• Friday, our dog
• Star the cat
• Our fish
• My "hall of fame" of published photos

Digital photography

Starting in 2006, I started (slowly) putting copies of all our photos on SmugMug, a relatively new photo company. One of the best features available with SmugMug is keywords, which give you the ability to rapidly pull up all pictures on a topic, regardless of when they were taken or what photo gallery they are in.  Please go to http://kralizec.smugmug.com/ to see our pictures.