Dave Beckerman, who keeps what is perhaps the longest running photoblog on the Web, has come up with a great idea.

The Society of PhotoBloggers, with membership limited to 50, will be set up so each member, on an appointed day, will have his/her  posts run on the blogs of all the other members. What that means is, each member gets to be a blog King (or Queen) for a day, in a virtual sense.

You can apply here. Only legitimate, interesting art photographers need bother. At last count about half the slots were gone.

Cool idea.

photo: Fence post, 2010

Someone out there, inspired by the essential cheesiness of the Jose Rodriguez wolf-jumping photo, fixed it up! It’s now got all the elements that the original, New Agey, made-to-be-an-inspirational-poster “nature” shot lacked: A full moon and two more wolves!

Let’s hope the benighted contest judges take notice….

Well, I got a voice mail from Ken himself just now. He sounded friendly but called for only one reason: To demand that I not use his photograph on my blog.

To which I say, are you kidding?

“I wouldn’t steal your work,” his voice mail message said. “And  you may not use my work without authorization.”

Relax, Ken.

First off, you can post all the Web-sized photos taken from my website that you want. I don’t consider it stealing.

Second, I’ve already taken your photo off my site.

Third, I guess I need to take back all those kind things I said about you. What an oddly ungenerous response to a flattering post.

Well, there you go.

photo: Clown image courtesy blackpixel at morguefile.com

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.

A show of my new and old hand-colored photographs is on display at the office of Eugene dentist Donald Dexter, 2233 Willamette St. Suite B, Eugene, during October and November.

The exhibit includes landscapes of the Northwest as well as a few bird photos; most work is 11×14 inches, framed to 16×20, but it also features a few small hand-colored prints, matted and framed  to 8×10 inches.

A reception will be held from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 30.

Dexter is an unusual dentist and regularly displays work by local artists. Read more about him here.

photo: Fern, 2009