A Note From Dow
Greetings, and welcome to my photo gallery.
Marlene and I have been enthusiastic birders for a dozen years or more. I always wanted to take pictures of the birds we saw in our travels, but it just wasn't practical with our early-model point-and-shoot digital camera. In June, 2005, our friend Dan left his Canon Digital Rebel with us for a couple of weeks, and invited us to take pictures with it. This corresponded with a long weekend we had planned for birding around Port Angeles, and I got very lucky with some action pictures of gulls. I was so excited about the pictures that I tried to buy Dan's camera from him, but he wouldn't sell.
In July 2005, the new model of Dan's camera, the XT, hit the shelf and appeared on the cover of Consumer Reports. So many of the pictures on these pages were taken with a Canon Digital Rebel XT, fitted with a 75-300mm telephoto lens. Since then, I've discarded 95% of all the pictures I take, and of the remaining pictures I've enjoyed some enough to share with family and friends. Thanks to their enthusiastic response, I continue to take pictures and add my favorites to these pages.
In August 2007, I purchased the new 10 megapixel Sony Alpha-100 DSLR, which has image stabilization built in to the camera body, and added a Tamron 200-500mm telephoto lens. When conditions are right, this camera provides up-close-and-personal images of the birds with great detail. I still use the Canon from time-to-time, and actually prefer it for the ease of use, but I mostly use the Sony now for the higher resolution images.
On the home page, which you can always get to by clicking my picture in the upper left corner of any page, I show the most recent nine pages added to the web site, and the date they were added. So if you just want to see what is new since your last visit, check here first. I recently revised the site to use a real menu in the left pane. The menu makes it a lot easier to add new pages where I want them, and got me back to work after a year of not adding any new pictures. In case you are interested, I created the menu with Xara MenuMaker.
My screen resolution is 1280x1024, so the entire web site displays on less than my full screen. The site displays on a 1024x768 screen in full width without scrolling, but is just a bit too high to display the bottom row of pictures without scrolling down. Well, I'd like to accommodate everybody, but I please myself first. At least all the enlargements should fit on 1024x768 without scrolling.
In May 2006 I had an unplanned opportunity to photograph four horses belonging to my brother and sister-in-law, as they (the horses...) frolicked in a pasture. The action shots were pretty neat, so we decided to schedule another photo op in July and invite more horses. After the third photo session, in May 2007, I decided I should make it easier for the owners of the horses to see the pictures, and built a web site for them. If you are interested in horses, feel free to check it out at: