Bob Keefer
Is a writer and photographer who lives in rural Oregon. This is an informal blog with no particular purpose other than to give myself something to do with some of the welter of photographs I take each day.
For more considered work, see my hand-colored photography at BobKeeferPhoto.com.
You can email me at bob/at/bkpix.com.
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Monthly Archives: January 2010
Birding by bicycle
I shot this photo today to go with an article my son is doing on motorless birding — people who keep lists of birds they’ve discovered within walking/biking distance of their homes.
It was late on a cloudy, foggy winter afternoon and I was shooting with the Pentax K20D. While I love the camera, it just really, really isn’t up to autofocusing under trying conditions. I shoulda used the Canon. The whole thing made my head spin with thoughts of dumping the Pentax and consolidating back to a single Canon system.
Then I calmed down….
photo: Noah, 2010
Some new hand colored photos
I added a couple new photos to the gallery this morning. Both are in the woods at home and both are small, about 5×7 inches.
This one, “Moss,” is one of my favorites lately.
photo: Moss, 2010
Amazonia
I got a sneak preview this morning of the “Amazonia” photography exhibit that opens January 17 at the University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.
The show contains about 60 large color inkjet prints of film images — yes, film! — shot over the last six years in the Amazon headwaters by National Geographic photographer Sam Abell and Danish wildlife photographer Torben Ulrik Nissen.
It’s quite a show. What I like best is that Abell and Nissen declined to shoot the usual wildlife pictures we’ve all come to expect. There are no glowing, golden-hour portraits of beautiful big animals. There are no close-ups of animals, period, with the possible exception of a big snake (a boa?) that they nearly stepped on before being alerted by their guide.
I’ve complained in the past about the dismal, dishonest state of nature photography today.
This show does it right, with photographs that are quiet and engaging.
photo: Three toed sloth with baby. By Sam Abell
New lens: Pentax 12-24/4
It arrived Monday from B&H. Haven’t had much time to play around with it, except to make sure that it actually takes pictures, but I wanted to replace the 10-22 that I had on my Canon 20D.
Not too useful for hand colored photography, as it doesn’t attach to any of my film bodies (actually, it will attach, but I bet the image circle is too small for film) but really my favorite focal length range for day-to-day photography. I love wide.
photo: Orchard in the fog, 2010
Happy 2010!
New year, new website design.
Actually it’s an old design, one I crafted several years ago in PHP with a MySQL database. I don’t really understand either PHP or MySQL, so it was a miracle the thing ever worked in the first place, and it turned out I was completely unable to perform any kind of software maintenance as time went by. So I scrapped it in favor of WordPress design.
I happen to take a look at it on the Wayback Machine the other day and realized I quite like the look.
So I copied it off Wayback and redid the thing in plain HTML (no fancy PHP programming) and attached Photocart to it to handle the database and sales side of things. Looks cool, and I don’t have to do the maintenance myself.