(Sitting in the back of the class while Kimberly's teaching and I'm cranking through my massive backlog of blog posts.)   Inside a lave tube with light streaming through ceiling holes and through the dust. After SQL Connections at the start of April in Las Vegas we drove across to San Diego for a friend's birthday [...]

  (A pair of Much-Desired Flabellinas mating.) We spent most of January in Indonesia and as part of the trip we spent 11 days on the fabulous Paradise Dancer live-aboard dive boat diving in the most bio-diverse waters in the world. The reefs were really healthy and there was an overwhelming abundance of life under the [...]

   We decided to escape the wintery weather in Seattle this year by coming to Indonesia for January (our third trip here), including a long dive trip in the remote Raja Ampat region near Papua. Before heading out there we spent a few days in Bali and yesterday we hooked up with our good friend [...]

(2-foot wide Octopus during a night dive off Turneffe Caye, Belize)   Kimberly and I headed to Belize in November for our first dive trip in well over a year (we're not letting that happen again!) and spent a week on the Belize Aggressor III liveaboard dive boat. Doing liveaboards is the only way to dive [...]

  Back in May when we were out in Chicago teaching one of our classes we had a spare day so we drove an hour west into the Illinois countryside to the absolutely excellent Illinois Railway Museum. I've always been a big train fan, stemming from the days back in the early '80s when I [...]

   Earlier today I took my Mum and Dad to walk around the beautiful Japanese Garden at the Washington Park Arboretum (part of the University of Washington Botanic Gardens) and I took along my camera to play around with leaves and light. Below are a selection of photos, all taken with a Canon 5D Mark II plus a Canon [...]

Back in April Kimberly and I flew to Munich to present a 2.5 day SQL Server track at the 2011 Microsoft-internal conference for the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) Premier Field Engineers. We had a great time presenting and after recovering from nasty colds we went wandering about in Munich city center the day before we flew [...]

This is the last (and longest)  post of my bald eagle shots from last week in Haines, Alaska. I'm calling this one "the many faces of bald eagles". When you spend a lot of time watching them close up, you realize just how varied their expressions can be and there's a temptation to anthropomorphize them. [...]

Two more blog posts to go – this one has my favorite flight shots from the week. All photos were taken in RAW at 5184×3456 with my Canon 7D, additional details given with each photo. The photos shown here are as taken, no zooming or cropping, with slight black/white setting in Lightroom. Click on all [...]

Today we got really up-close-and-personal with the bald eagles up here in Haines, AK. It was a toasty 22F out on the river delta but the light was stunning, coming directly from behind us over the mountains, but without being too glaring. Click on all photos for 1024×768 enlargements.    This was taken with my [...]

This week Kimberly and I are in Haines, AK honing our photography skills using the numerous bald eagles as subjects. We're up here with photo-pro and friend Jon Cornforth, getting excellent advice. This week we've been taking the best photos of our lives thanks to Jon's tips and tricks!   A bunch of you at [...]