2015
This year was a year of change for me. Many things changed but most importantly I made the plunge and went BIG upgrading my camera. I got a new Sony A7ii without the stock lens, in favor of investing in a 20mm f/2.8 and 50mm f/1.8 primes. The 50mm I quite like and feels very natural to me because I started taking photos in high school on a 35mm film camera with a 50mm prime attached.
You'll see a few photos of Santa Cruz where I was living at the time I got my new camera, and a few in Mendocino, but more importantly my wife and I took an epic road trip to Yosemite Valley, Zion National Park, Rocky Mountain Colorado, and Tahoe! We had some great adventures, did a lot of driving, and a lot of hiking. As well as staying at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park.
Earlier in the year I signed up for SmugMug (the platform this site is built on) because when you build web applications all day like I do you choose the best CMS out there for each site. So rather than building a new photo site from scratch I decided to give SmugMug a try mainly because I didn't want to code or integrate my own e-commerce web store for my photos. I have been building websites since 2004, and more importantly I have been building complex full stack web applications at my software engineering and graphic design job with Jabico Enterprises in Santa Cruz. Web developers are accustomed to tinkering with all the little nuances, bugs, and gotchas for endless hours of problem solving, that when you stumble upon a well polished, robust service such as SmugMug you know you have hit gold. I've been changing and customizing my SmugMug site ever since.
Long story short, I fell so in love this web application that I contacted SmugMug, applied for a job as a designer, got a job a software engineer, moved to Silicon Valley to work with them and never looked back.
Read MoreYou'll see a few photos of Santa Cruz where I was living at the time I got my new camera, and a few in Mendocino, but more importantly my wife and I took an epic road trip to Yosemite Valley, Zion National Park, Rocky Mountain Colorado, and Tahoe! We had some great adventures, did a lot of driving, and a lot of hiking. As well as staying at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park.
Earlier in the year I signed up for SmugMug (the platform this site is built on) because when you build web applications all day like I do you choose the best CMS out there for each site. So rather than building a new photo site from scratch I decided to give SmugMug a try mainly because I didn't want to code or integrate my own e-commerce web store for my photos. I have been building websites since 2004, and more importantly I have been building complex full stack web applications at my software engineering and graphic design job with Jabico Enterprises in Santa Cruz. Web developers are accustomed to tinkering with all the little nuances, bugs, and gotchas for endless hours of problem solving, that when you stumble upon a well polished, robust service such as SmugMug you know you have hit gold. I've been changing and customizing my SmugMug site ever since.
Long story short, I fell so in love this web application that I contacted SmugMug, applied for a job as a designer, got a job a software engineer, moved to Silicon Valley to work with them and never looked back.
