This also seems to be a pretty random collection of photos. Some of these pictures were taken by Teresa.

These pictures come from:

Backup/Old My Pictures/New Photos

Sadly My Photoshop Skills Haven’t Improved


This is the 1st picture I ever had accepted to the State Fair.
















This autographed picture was given to me by Steph. Simon Estes pulled it out of his trunk when she asked for it.

Next week’s folder will be:

Backup/Old My Pictures/Photoshop

Seems like most of my folders have a subfolder named New Folder. This New Folder contains some pretty random pictures. Some of these were taken by Carla.

This week’s folder:

Backup/Old My Pictures/New Folder

Next week’s folder will be:

Backup/Old My Pictures/New Photos

There are 3 very special people that were born on July 12 and they are each worthy of their own individual birthday photo tribute. So I will start from youngest and go to oldest.

Here is my photo birthday tribute to Logan:

Elainie graduated a couple weeks back. Here are a couple of pictures from the day.

I didn’t take a camera to the Open House for some reason. I clearly now regret that.

Next Wednesday’s randomness will feature pictures of Evie.

These pictures come from the following folder: Backup/Old My Pictures/Family/2004 McHose

I think these pictures are fairly self explanatory.

Next week’s folder will be: Backup/Old My Pictures/Family/Teresa & Ernie

These pictures come from: backup/Old My Pictures/Family/2004 B&W

One of the things I take from these pictures is that I have progressed in my knowledge of lighting quite a bit.

Plus I owned a pretty terrible scanner.

Next week’s folder: backup/Old My Pictures/Family/2004-McHose

These pictures are from: backup/Old My Pictures/2005 Calendar

I’m pretty sure these are the files from the 2nd year of the calendar, although it is possible that it was the 3rd or 1st year of the calendar. My records on such things are spotty at best.

In the early days of the calendar I made “individualized” calendars, but I only made 3 calendars back then, so it was somewhat easy to do. That is why there are more than 12 images in this folder.

These pictures would have been taken in 2004.

Until “Outburst of the Soul” this was the most popular picture I ever made. To this date, I believe it is the only picture I’ve ever taken that inspired a musical composition.






This is the first digital picture I ever took.






This picture was taken in Tulum near Cozumel. It was also fairly popular in its day.


This picture was taken between Upper Cullen Lake and Middle Cullen Lake in Minnesota.


This was the 1st (kind of feels like the last) picture I had accepted to the Iowa State Fair Photography Salon. Apparently I’ve regressed as a photographer since this photo, the peak of my photography “career”.








I once had this terrible idea called the Beaver Machete Project. I’ll probably have to explain this later, but I’m going to buy myself a week or so to think of a good excuse for why I thought this was a good idea.

Next week’s look at the archives will be: backup/Old My Pictures/Animals

A cursory glance of this folder reveals very few pictures of animals.

Small bookkeeping note, with this Journal Entry, Teresa becomes the 6th Person to be featured, mentioned, or alluded to in 100 entries. I’m sure she’ll put that on her resume.

Looks like Shannon and Angie did find RWPE addictive. They submitted again for last week’s theme FACE. However, submissions were kind of light this week. Perhaps not as many people know people with faces as I would have suspected.

Here are the submissions for FACE:

Mike Vest


Angie DeWaard


Christopher D. Bennett


Shannon Bardole

I’ve been up to the 5th floor penthouse that houses the Random Generator. It was fired up and spit out a good topic for this week:

There are several ways to interpret this theme, so I will be excited to see the submissions!

Labor Day became a federal holiday in 1894 after a number of Americans were murdered by the military during the Pullman Strike. After the massacre, President Grover Cleveland made reconciliation with unions a top political priority. Making Labor Day a national holiday was his form of reconciliation.

I celebrated Grover Cleveland’s political savvy and everything unions have done for this country and the memory of the 13 strikers murdered during the Pullman Strike by having the family over for a barbecue. Here are a few pictures:

Hope your Labor Day was as joyous as mine.

“The trouble with retirement is that you never get a day off.”
-Abe Lemons

Sunday was my Mom’s retirement party. Here are a few pictures:

There are more pictures from the party in the Mom’s Retirement Party Album in the Snapshots Gallery.