Greg's Mini Photo Gallery

Greg got interested in amateur photography at least as far back as high school, probably in part due to his interest in astronomy. A high school class in black-and-white photography was interesting from a technical standpoint, but not enough so to spend lots of money on developing equipment.

The following is a small sample of some of Greg's favorite analog photographs. These were all scanned from prints back in 1995 or so; the original plan was to replace them with high-quality PhotoCD versions, but that's looking rather unlikely at this point, ten years later. (Maybe Greg will get a slide/negative scanner someday...yeah, probably not.)

The first is l'Arc de Triomphe in Paris; this was taken the night before the first shuttle launch (minor trivia) in mid-April 1981. Greg was a high-school student on a class trip with the other ten or twelve students in his French class. This image was actually quite a lucky shot; Greg was using an old Minolta SLR 35mm camera, ASA 100 film and no remote shutter release or tripod. He guessed at the exposure (around half a second?) and balanced the camera on one of the little traffic pylons in the middle of the boulevard. It worked. Whoa, gnarly.

The second is a shot of Pine Lake in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, a lovely preserve spanning the Minnesota/Canada border. This was an evening shot from August of 1989 (maybe?), looking east from one of the portages. The first three campsites were already in use, as were all of the campsites on the previous two lakes (Caribou Lake and Little Caribou Lake), so Greg and his companions ended up setting up camp after dark. That wasn't a whole lot of fun, but in the morning they had fresh blueberry pancakes, which pretty much made up for it.

The third image was another lucky shot, in more ways than one. It was taken in late August of 1988, while Greg was fleeing the oppressive heat of Chicago on his way to Silicon Valley for the first time. He was tooling along I-80 in southern Wyoming, enjoying this gorgeous sunset and the nearly complete lack of traffic, when he noticed the farm buildings on the horizon "approaching" the setting sun. Seconds later he popped off this shot through the windshield. This was taken with a Contax (auto-winder, Zeiss 50mm lens, automatic exposure control and not much else) and unknown film--probably Kodak Gold 200 print film, however.

One of these days Greg will add a few more photos here, possibly to include one or more of the following:

Wreck of the Ridgefield, east Grand Cayman, 1985

Sarah's eel

Blue Angels in formation (F-18s) and doing the JATO thing (Fat Albert, C-130)

...but more likely some of his nice digital shots of bugs and whatnot.