June 25th, 2010 by Brian Cooney

Stone wall in Lebanon PA

While digging through my iphoto library, I found this picture of a stone wall I saw in a park in Lebanon PA a few years ago.  This was taken long before I had ever even thought of owning a Digital SLR camera,  with a Kodak point and shoot.  I remember taking a long walk through the park, and just thinking this wall was beautiful.  At that point in time, I didn’t take many pictures, but I always had my point and shoot in my pocket, and when I saw something that really struck my eye a frame would be made.

I carry my SLR with me just about everywhere too, but it is usually in a backpack, not a pocket, so it is far less accessible.  Sometimes, I wonder how many images like this one I miss because its so much more work to get the SLR ready to create an image than that old Kodak.  If the Kodak didn’t have a broken screen, maybe I would just carry both.  Do you carry a point and shoot when you don’t have your SLR?  Or do you just carry a Point and shoot all the time like I did back then?  Do you ever miss a shot because you just cant get the camera out of a backpack fast enough, and its just not convenient enough to always have it in your hand or in super easy reach?  And if you do miss those shots, does it bother you, or do you just shrug it off?

January 10th, 2010 by Brian Cooney

My name is Brian Cooney. The first time I picked up a camera, I was probably 10. I somehow could always get film, but never manage to get it developed, so I didn’t learn a thing. In High school, I played with SLR cameras in Graphic Arts class… and I loved it, but I never did anything with it outside of the loaner cameras, and in class darkroom. Photography simply was priced way out of my budget as a kid. About five years ago, I finally bought a digital camera and started occasionally “snapping” some shots. Three years ago, I bought my first SLR. Now, I spend most of my free time reading other peoples blogs, and hardly doing any shooting of my own. When I do shoot, I show the unedited files to my wife, and then forget about them. The purpose of this blog is to allow me to share my work with more than just my beautiful wife. It is to help me torture you instead. It is to force me to actually learn to edit those images, and do something with them. Hopefully, I will actually get good enough at this blog thing to have at least one regular reader, besides my Wife .  I have done blogs before… and never update them. Hopefully, this will be a year of change. I will try to keep most of my posts photography related, but dont be suprised to see some tech rants too. All and all, if you have read this much stuff, mabey I can hook you in and keep you here for awhile! Add me to your RSS feeds, and comment on my posts. Finally, If you blog, let me know about it and Ill check out your work!

My first order of business will be to meet up with my brother and make this blog look like…. well not like a default wordpress.  Tommy is a Digital Arts major… so hopefully he can help me come up with a slick, sexy, custom layout.  Once that is one, I will need to move some other websites from my old server back to my new one…. the one this blog is running on, and redirect cooney.cc to this machine instead of my old blog.  Then it will be time to figure out some of the magic of making the blog sing and dance….  and customize it to really fit my needs.  Hopefully, the learning curve of switching from Slackware to CentOS for my server wont get in the way…. but so far so good.  My end goal:  A new blog, and an update once per week!  Stay tuned to see if I can pull it off!