Greetings! Thanks for visiting my site! I am a programmer/analyst and instructional designer who loves to dabble in photography and poetry and of late, scrapbooking - both paper-based and digital. My husband Benny has an antique and furniture refinishing business called Second Looks and I've put up this site to complement his business site by offering free wall-paper.

I've only had one photography class through our community college - that was several years ago and, unfortunately, they didn't have a dark room where we could learn how to develop our photos. So I'm strictly an amateur. :) But since then the advent of digital cameras and digital "darkroom" tools such as Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Fireworks has put wonderful picture taking within the average person's reach more than ever. We've come a long way from the little "box" cameras of our youth. Of course achieving the right exposure, as well as optimal composition, framing, and focusing of our subject is essential when taking a picture. These processes must occur when the shot is taken - but the final result is a matter of interpretation of an image's "soul" - or perhaps the soul of its creator - the details and effects that caught our eye and were the reason we took the picture in the first place. That's not to say that photographs don't sometimes take on a life of their own or that a professional might not tell us that the more setup we do with the camera, the less work we require in the dark room. But still, the "digital dark room" allows us all, amateur or professional, to bring out and to give weight in many different ways

to what inspired us in the first place. When we send our pictures away to be developed, so much time elapses that we forget the details. Someone else makes all the decisions, and our labors of love may be still born.

Lately, I've been introduced to the wonderful world of scrapbooking and have come into my own. I realize that I am really more of a "point and shooter" and a "photographic journaler" than a serious photographer. So eventually I think this site will take on more of a scrap-booking look and feel. Stay tuned ...

Photography for me is a mix of training, practice/experimentation, happy accident, and interesting subjects from day to day life. When these features all come together, then you get a picture to die for! But that's a rare occurrence. The photos in these exhibits have been taken with a Pentax K1000 35 MM manual SLR camera, Olympus C3000 and C5050 Digital cameras,various lower end HP digital cameras, Kodak single focus 35 MM, and now a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ35. The non digital photos have been scanned at some point with hp desk scanners or a Polaroid Sprintscan 4000 slide and negative scanner - but scanning's another story altogether. =:o

Anyway, feel free to drop in and browse for computer wallpaper in the galleries below. When they are of adequate quality, I make my images 1024x768 - and I have several of these. I also have images 800x600 or smaller depending on what size they look best. And as my "developing" skills and tools improve I revisit pictures on occasion and try to improve upon them.

Also feel free to visit our fabulous guest galleries and blogs! And please bear with me - I hope eventually to get the gallery images loaded into a database to be available at different resolutions via scripting and to make the gallery sizes more manageable - just for the sake of learning how, because it's a cool thing to do, and to make the site more accessible and user friendly. I would also like to start a blog of my personal journey in photography and scrapbooking, ut for now, you know how that thing called life gets in the way ... ;)

Jeanne

Now! On to the Galleries!

A PHOTO BLOG SITE with Links to Other Photo Blog Sites