500px

I joined 500px, a professional, semipro, and serious-amateur photo gallery site, so I can collect and display my serious-amateur/semipro photos in a better light, so to speak.  Many of the other photographers on this site are serious-professionals, National Geographic and art gallery level.  I could see that as intimidating, but I choose to see it as inspiring instead.  Studying such highly skilled photography helps me discern what I most want to express in my photos as well as how to make them better.  I've begun that process of study on Instagram, which gave me a flood of examples of photography both skilled and unskilled to peruse and find what grabbed me and what didn't.  I'm not interested in conventional nature photography—I want to find the quirkiness and personality of the environments and their inhabitants that I encounter.  And I'm not interested (right now—maybe I'll develop an interest later) in manipulated photos, like double-exposures or mirror images, etc.  I want to let subjects speak for themselves, to share the natural wonder of this world we live in.  And "natural" to me includes human beings in all our wounded glory.  Contrary to what I've put up on 500px so far, I don't just take pictures of birds.

My new camera is supposed to arrive today, and in a couple of weeks we'll leave on our journey through NY City, Nashville, and Pittsburgh, followed by 3 months in Montreal, so I'll have many new and different environments to explore!  I'll create lots more sets of photos on 500px and share links to them here.  I'm so excited…

500px.com/dkddm/sets/birdfeeder-2015