I’ve accumulated a number of photos left over from con art shows, and since I’m unaccustomed to dealing with a type of business where I need to wrangle inventory, I’d like to sell some of these and get them out of my house. 😛 Therefore, I give you the 2019 SWAN TOWER PHOTO SALE! Excellent for gift-giving, if you celebrate a holiday in the near future that involves such things. Or a holiday later on that involves such things. Or you know someone who has a birthday. Or you have a birthday of your own. Or just because it’s a day ending in Y. All of these are good reasons to buy!

You can peruse the photos in this gallery. All of them are ready to hang; the black-and-white ones are printed on acrylic panels with French cleats on the back, and most of the color ones are “thinwraps” with keyholed foam blocks on the back. (The exceptions are the July Column and the Point Lobos tree.) Sizes range from 8×8 to 8×16. Prices range from $50-$100 plus shipping, with the black-and-white acrylic panels, the Mongolian archer, and the skull + driftwood being on the higher end due to size or materials, and the vortex ceiling being the $50 example due to being smaller. If you’d like to purchase one of them, get in touch!

And as usual, you’re always welcome to order photos from the rest of my catalogue. Those can be printed on any medium you like — paper for framing, thinwraps of paper or canvas, regular canvas wraps, acrylic panels, metal, glass, wood, etc. — and in a variety of sizes. Drop me a line to discuss options!

Over Memorial Day weekend I was hired to do candid and portrait photography at a three-day LARP (one my husband plays in, which I’ve played in before, but not regularly).

This was . . . an adventure.

See, my usual attitude toward people photography is “I will wait here with my camera poised until you get out of the frame.” My tastes, as you can probably tell, lean firmly toward architecture, objects, and landscapes. Sometimes I can’t avoid having people in the picture, and every so often they add a great deal to the image — the dude in the punt in Cambridge (though I wish the two up on the wall weren’t there), or the guy walking in front of the church in Basel — but people are rarely if ever the reason I’m taking the picture.

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My recent trip to Yosemite netted me enough good photos that I’ve broken all my shots of the park out of the California gallery and into one of their own. Before, there were two; now there are eighteen! I’ve also added three Yosemite photos to the flower gallery. (I . . . think the thing you see in two of them is a flower? It may be a fungus. I’m not exactly a forest ranger.)

As usual, if you’d like to purchase prints (on any medium: paper, wood, glass, acrylic, metal, and more) or license any of the images for use in book covers etc., drop me a line!

The place I order photo prints from has a sale on their canvas wraps, 25% off. If you’d like to order one of my pictures, now’s a great time to do it! Just skim through the galleries until you find something you like, then contact me to discuss specifics. Prices start at about $50 (with the discount) up to . . . I can’t promise any of my photos are crisp enough to still look good when blown up to five feet across, but if you want to spend five hundred dollars finding out, we can do that. 🙂

The sale lasts for one week, so you’ve got a few days, but with the back-and-forth of discussing style and size, don’t wait too long to make up your mind.

I recently got into a conversation with someone who wants to do more/better photography, and as such things usually do, the conversation went immediately to “what camera should I buy?”

Which made me realize there might be value in writing up a post about how that isn’t where most people should start.

It’s easy to see photography as a matter of gear: if you have better gear, you’ll take better pictures. There’s some truth in this, of course; your light sensor is your light sensor, and if you have a bad one you’re going to get crappy low-light pictures. You can’t take a good telephoto picture without a telephoto lens. Etc. But the way I see it, that’s, like, step three in the process of becoming a better photographer. If you’ve taken steps one and two already, then by all means let’s talk gear — but if you haven’t, then let’s back up for a moment and talk about what comes before that.

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If you’d like to order a photograph for someone on your holiday list (or for yourself! that’s okay, too!), my galleries are here! Aaaaaand, I have finally gotten off my duff and finished editing my pictures from the Okinawa trip this summer, so there are three new galleries: one for the trip as a whole, and then specific ones for the former royal estate of Shikina-en and one for Gyokusendo Cave.

Depending on where I order the print from, I can get it done on pretty much any medium you like: paper, glass, canvas, wood, aluminum, acrylic, etc. Sizes are flexible, too. If you’re interested, drop me a line!

I have a favor to ask of y’all!

I recently began posting some of my photography at Dreamstime, one of those stock image sites. I’ve put up a decent-sized batch as my test case — but I suspect their visibility in searches is influenced by how many views each of them already has. Ergo, I’d love it if those of you with a moment to spare could check out my gallery and click through to some (or all!) of the pictures there.

(And if you happen to go “wow, that’s perfect for X purpose of mine!,” they are of course available for licensing!)

Also, don’t forget, my winter black-and-white sets are for sale through my site, in any print medium or size you might want.