(Properly spelled, my name is Van de Graaff.)This bio has been growing increasingly out of date.  I started in February 2010 in Paris and partially revised it that summer. So it's high time for this next update. Here it is (November 2011), but on the other hand I've increasingly reali Read more...

(Properly spelled, my name is Van de Graaff.)This bio has been growing increasingly out of date.  I started in February 2010 in Paris and partially revised it that summer. So it's high time for this next update. Here it is (November 2011), but on the other hand I've increasingly realized that the best way to figure out what's up with me is simply to poke around in my journal.  We've continued to travel, to France and elsewhere. But the main thing that's happened to us in the last 18 months is everything related to the construction of our new house (blips are here).

I initially described myself as  a bird photographer (a note on my equipment follows). Here I'm wearing the tee shirt celebrating 25 years of our local bird club, with my bird photos.

Birds remain a key focus for me, but joining  blipfoto has fundamentally altered my approach  to photography. I see pictures everywhere, of different kinds (evident to  blippers who have stopped by with any frequency)--and of course I always try to have a camera along, especially on our travels. A further thing is that I've become increasingly aware about themes that I've pursued (other than birds).  Some of them I've explicitly tagged as series. I've added many images to the series since Blip Central has added the capability to add tags to any previous blip. That's just one of many incremental  improvements to the blipfoto site--it was great when I joined, but it gets steadily  better.

Series Links.
The themes of my tagged series include:
U.S. birds;
Canadian birds;
the Galapagos Islands;  
construction in 2010-11 of our current house and the large house on the same lot (which replaced our original condominium);
 local houses in our area;
agriculture in our region (mainly tobacco);
shadows;
and reflections

On my equipment for most of my bird shots:  I use a 400 mm lens with a doubler (2x tele-extender). The camera's metadata records it as 800 mm--and blipfoto echoes that--impressing many blippers, but it's not blipfoto's fault. The lens is Canon's 400 mm f/4 DO lens with IS*;  DO stands for"Diffractive Optics", a technology rendering a lens smaller and lighter than with standard optics.  *IS is image stabilization--becoming common nowadays--which permits me to handhold in many situations even with the doubler--I swear by the combination.

See my web site here.  It includes a painted bunting, which appeared on the cover of Birders' World magazine in June 2006.