Dust and Rust

Run, Rabbit Run

I went to the Van Vleck House in Montclair hoping to find some butterflies. I didn’t find any, but I did catch this guy running away from my son. I can’t get the Pink Floyd lyrics out of my head now.

Bryant Park Rainbow

Welcome to the 100th Post at DustAndRust! In my first post on this blog back in the fall of 2005, I wrote :

I think the lack of any effort I have put into finding a direction has been well worth it . Having the blog as an outlet for my hobby has really given me a lot of satisfaction over the past four years, and I still look forward to capturing the next image that I think is worthy to share. I’d like to thank everyone who has come to look at my humble efforts, with a special “thank you” to everyone that has left a comment.

It’s been very interesting to watch the blog grow in the wilds of the inter-tubes. In the first month of the blogs life, I had 86 unique visitors, and just under 1000 page views. A good portion of those page views was probably due to me tweaking the layout. In March of this year, I had 9558 unique visitors, and over 40,000 page views. The biggest source of traffic has been Google Image Search, which drives almost exactly 50% of the visitors here.

I don’t have any major plans to change anything I’m doing here. As I’ve mentioned before, I will be offering B&W prints for sale in the near future… but for the most part the blog remains the same.

I’m looking forward to the next 100 posts. I hope I can get them here faster than the first 100.

Thanks for stopping by!

Sean

Bird on Cactus, Aruba

I took a short trip to Aruba with my wife back in 2003. We spent most of the time relaxing on the beach, but we did take a little back road drive along the less populated side of the island. I caught this guy hanging out on his perch. It looked pretty uncomfortable, but I guess it was a good vantage point for hunting. I was using my Nikon D100 back then, and I’m still impressed by the quality of the images I made with it.

Misty Morning Marsh

This photo has been sitting in my collection since 2003. I could never quite get the photo to look as I remembered the scene that morning. I was browsing through my collection with Lightroom today, and I decided to give it another shot. I was much happier with the results this time around. A key to making it work was using the Lightroom “clarity” slider… in the negative direction. Turning down the clarity brought out some of the calm and quiet that was missing from my previous attempts.

Fountains at Columbus Circle

I took this photo back in October of 2006. I had taken my wife to dinner for her birthday, and took this shot as we were leaving the neighborhood. I braced the camera on the edge of the fountain, turned off the flash, and got a pretty good result for a quick grab. I’ve been going through my catalog to get a set of shots ready for some B&W printing… I’ve added this one to the collection for consideration.