Mucky Duck Pub,
St. Patrick's Day, 2007
Photography
I've been taking pictures since I was a wee little thing. Somewhere in a box in my closet are some blurry black and white prints that came out of a two-dollar plastic camera that my mom bought for me when I was six. I moved on from there to borrowing my mom's Instamatic, followed in the years to come by my own series of point and shoot Kodaks and Polaroids. I bought my first 35mm SLR to take to Hawaii in 1986, and I've been motoring ever since.
For a long time, my photography was mostly limited
to landscapes and travel photography, but a few years ago, I became
acquainted with a pipe and drum band out of Houston, and I started taking
pictures of them and their Celtic friends. I tried my hand at concert
photography and found out how hard challenging
it is: taking pictures of moving subjects, on stages littered with equipment,
in unpredictable lighting conditions, where flash is either impossible
or a bad idea, while trying to capture the story of the event in images.
What's not to love? I was hooked.
My trusty old film camera died in the line of duty in a tragic mead spill on St. Patrick's Day, 2005. Since then I've been shooting digital. (This is a true story. That's really what happened to it.)
My pictures to date have been used on CD covers and inserts, in press packages, and on band websites. My specialty is available light and candid photography; what you see is what you get. More recently I've been getting into studio and location lighting. This winter I completed a weeklong, intensive lighting workshop with Douglas Merriam at the Santa Fe Workshops.
Web Design
I've been an Internet denizen since 1991, and I built my first webpages in 1996. I pretty much live and die by my computer, and so I have a lot of experience with what works and what doesn't. I like to build sites that are intuitive and pleasant to interact with.
I make my living at my day job as a webmaster for a U.S. Federal government research lab, so I am required by law to make that site accessible for those who use assistive technologies to surf the web (text readers for the blind, etc.), as well as to abide by prescribed security and privacy standards (which I take very seriously). The result of all of this is that building secure, acccessible websites is second nature to me now.
I have extensive experience with XHTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, Perl, MySQL, Linux, Unix, Apache, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Fireworks, and an array of related applications, and I've started picking up Ruby on Rails this year. I specialize in the development of LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) and AJAX web applications, with special attention paid to usability and security.
So hey, I hope you like the site. If you want more, feel free to get in touch.
Sláinte!
Vicki