© Brad Mangas

Welcome back, I think that is probably meant more for me than anyone. I took a little break from posting here over the long holiday weekend, lots of activity both work and play. I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and Santa treated all well. I’m posting this from the new computer which I finally got all setup and raring to go, still some programs to get downloaded and installed but for the most part this new i7 machine is a running like a champ. New NEC display complete with Spectraview II calibration system will hopefully help with all future image processing.

This image was taken 2 winters ago after a hard ice storm moved through this part of Kansas. A venture into the outdoors was like walking into a magical land of crystal. Every single item sparkled and shined as the sun cast it’s brightness on to it. Each step produced a breaking and crunch of frozen ground. Even with the anticipated damage such storms cause I captured by it’s beauty and happily explored the near by land. Worked up in black and white using Nik Silver Effex Pro was in my opinion my only option for such an image.

Now for some of the “Newer Thought” section. I have been doing some thinking about the last year and how I utilize this blog for my photography. As all who have followed during that time first, thank you, I really do appreciate you being part of this endeavor. My thinking and concerns have been focused on the benefits this blog space provides to readers, after all that is the reason for having an online presence and for spending time visiting such sites. I have to confess what has become a concern for me and that are the benefits this blog provides to you the reader. The biggest majority of posts have been my 13 month long “Daily Photograph” project. Started as a way to incorporate my photography into daily happenings with general photos and short snippets of information, I now have the feeling I may be simply posting such things just to be posting with no real purpose. The last month or so I have been disappointed with most of my Daily Photograph posts. At times I find myself rushing to get something posted with not much thought put behind it. That’s not fair to you the reader and not the purpose of starting the project to begin with. So with that realized I have decided it’s time to move forward. This will be the last entry of the Daily Photograph. That does not mean I wont be posting at times on a daily basis but for the most part I need to put more effort into providing better content to posts instead of just filling up pages. There will always be thing put on that are nothing more than general daily happenings such as my wonderful morning walks with Lexi, it’s still important those personal things don’t go away. My plan is to share more on all the wonderful benefits of photography from personal musings to image processing to other photographers blogs and websites. I have lots of reading to get caught up on from my beautiful large hardback copies of Michael Forsberg’s Great Plains and On Ancient Wings books to about a dozen ebooks from Craft & Vision to Guy Tal just to name a couple of sources, reviews and opinions of such things will also become a bigger part of the content. Another example will be what I will be working on as soon as this entry is posted and that are my images submissions for the summer edition of the KANSAS! Magazine, which are due December 31, wow that is only 3 days away! I can usually get images picked, put on cd, packaged along with additional info in a morning, but I have pushed this down to the wire so this is the closest deadline I need to tackle. I will make sure to share my choices here so you all can be the first to see what may or may not be in the summer 2011 edition from yours truly.

OK, I have probably rambled on enough for now time to get choosing those images. One additional note, I have mentioned the new website recently that is about to go live, my hope was to have it up by now but like many new things issues come up. My designer/programmer guru is working an issue that happened as I was uploading images to it last week so that means a slight delay but still very close. (And yes my fingers are crossed).