As a semi-retired guy from Alaska, I’m busier than ever.

Design­ing and post­ing to this Travel Site is a new chap­ter in a long career in the graphic arts.  I worked in com­mer­cial print­ing doing pre-press lith­o­g­ra­phy, type­set­ting and lay­out work, most of my adult life.  I also did a lot of pho­tog­ra­phy along the way.  In the early ’80’s I ran my own pre-press trade shop pro­duc­ing ‘camera-ready’ ad slicks and loose color sep­a­ra­tions from a 299L Hell drum scan­ner.  It was a giant thing.  We catered to local Ad agen­cies, PR firms and a few oil com­pa­nies.  That all ended with the advent of desk­top publishing.

I’ve been using Pho­to­shop since ver­sion 2.5.  Yes, I’m that old.

I posted my first Web page to the ‘Net in 1996 and have free­lanced pho­tog­ra­phy and graphic design for quite some time.

Pho­tog­ra­phy is my first pas­sion… some­thing I’m dri­ven to do.

I’m finally back to sell­ing Fine Art Pho­to­graphic Prints via my new Site on ImageKind. The ImageKind ‘Wid­get’ in the side­bar on the right will take you to my 3 gal­leries.  From there, you can order prints in sev­eral sizes and in sev­eral dif­fer­ent configurations.

My pho­tog­ra­phy spans more than 40 years.  I still have B&W neg­a­tives from a Brownie box cam­era I used to pho­to­graph the after­math of the Good Fri­day Earth­quake of March 27th, 1964 in down­town Anchor­age.  I’ve shot with every­thing from half-frame 35mm to stu­dio 4x5’s.  Back then, I main­tained a sec­ond dark­room at home with 3 enlarg­ers so I could process and print my own com­pos­ite black & white images.  Today, I shoot a mix of dig­i­tal SLR and medium for­mat film, depend­ing on the appli­ca­tion.  Even if I shoot to film, I still scan it and do all my ‘dark­room’ work in Photoshop.

A very spe­cial thanx to “ChiChi Con­suelo” for assist­ing
with the pirate por­trait and intro video.. Arrg!!!

About the Blog and Site Details:

My Blog is not your typ­i­cal dia­tribe about the island’s upscale Casino hotels, its superla­tive golf courses or its health spas which attract the rich and famous.

Those are things we already know about Puerto Rico. None of that will be fea­tured here.

To expose the heart and soul of Puerto Rico..  some­thing miss­ing from main­stream media.

A one man effort to demon­strate what makes Puerto Rico, “The Jewel of the Caribbean”.  That said, I will also point out what to avoid and the cul­tural dif­fer­ences between the res­i­dents of Puerto Rico and main­land US, all in a most respect­ful way.  I live by the adage– “When in Rome…”.

So I’ll be sam­pling every­thing the island has to offer, the food, the music, the cul­ture and the his­tory. I will be report­ing on it here, a few times a month, allow­ing for any com­pli­ca­tions.  A one man show of sorts… Anthony Bour­dane, look out!  Who knows, I might actu­ally get a tattoo.

I’ve spent a lot of time research­ing the “Com­mon­wealth of Puerto Rico” for this Web Site…

Besides 400 years of Span­ish his­tory and a very col­or­ful past, Puerto Rican’s are fiercely proud of their island.  Whether it will remain a com­mon­wealth of the US or not, only time will tell.

If I were to rate my Blog for ‘adult con­tent’, I would say PG-13.

I will avoid any vul­gar lan­guage or bla­tant nudity, I promise.  How­ever, I will be cov­er­ing mature adult sub­jects like Casi­nos, Cock Fight­ing, the Night Life, ExPat sto­ries and the seed­ier side of the island’s culture.

Noth’ns off-limits.  Be Yee Warned… Arrg!

Win­ter is the most pop­u­lar time to visit, for obvi­ous rea­sons.  Most tourists sel­dom ven­ture out of San Juan.  In my first trip of 5 weeks, I spent a lit­tle over a week in San Juan before tak­ing off to explore the rest of the island.

That’s all his­tory… After 46 years in Alaska, I moved to the island for good, 9 weeks later.  I’ll miss Alaska, but I like Puerto Rico that much.  Still do!

“After all, this Blog’s ded­i­cated to  folks like me,
free thinkers liv­ing on a bud­get who love to explore.”

Tools Used to Cre­ate the Dog’s Blog:

The “look and feel” for this Travel Blog was orig­i­nally cre­ated on an old Dual Proces­sor G4 Mac with an inter­nal zero raid array, using Adobe’s Cre­ative Suit. A cus­tom Word­Press theme was cre­ated with Artis­teer. A mature tool for Win­doz, but still in beta for Mac (as of this post update).

Artis­teer is quite fun to use and encour­ages you to experiment.

It is pos­si­ble to put up a free Word­Press Blog, but you are stuck with using their themes. Not a big deal since they have dozens to choose from.

I also found myself hav­ing to learn to use Final­Cut Express for edit­ing YouTube videos so I could add title graph­ics, a Web­site water­mark and music.  Every frame of every video has the Web­site address incor­po­rated.  Me YouTube vids now have their own Page on the Dog’s Blog.

As of late 2011, I’ve retired the ven­er­a­ble DP G4 and aging 17″ Mac­Book pro and now work entirely from a 27″ iMac con­nected to sev­eral back-up hard dri­ves.  The Zero Raid is now mounted in an exter­nal Firewire 800 case.

Images and Video…

As far as cam­era gear goes, 95% of the still images were shot with an ‘aging’ Sony A100 D/SLR (10MP) along with 3 AF lenses– A very wide zoom, a short macro zoom and a medium tele­photo zoom.  Most of my shots are done with the very wide angle zoom.  I recently scored a true macro and look for­ward to using it.  All images are enhanced for the Web via Pho­to­shop.  A more detailed break­down can be seen on the Photo Tips Page.  Almost all the videos were shot with a sim­ple VadoHD and edited in Final­Cut Express as men­tioned on my ded­i­cated YouTube Page.

You may pre­view my Pri­vacy Pol­icy here.

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