Winter Engagement Photos

A fun winter engagement shoot with Joe and Nicole at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.

Family Photo Fun

Long live the King!

Orono High School Homecoming Coronation at half time of the the football game.

Josh holding a sparkler

A kid on the 4th of July... no class! (it's an inside joke...)

Book Burning: Last Day of School!

Kyle and friends burn their old workbooks and papers on the last day of school.

We never did this when I was a kid, but it's a fun way to kick off summer vacation!

Mother Humpback Whale and calf frolicking

I got to spend a half an hour watching a mother humpback whale teaching her calf all the "sassy" tricks a young whale needs to know for the tourist trade in the waters off Maui, Hawaii earlier this week!

How to migrate 100,000+ photos to Aperture 3 with minimum pain

I've had Aperture 3 for a couple weeks now, and I've been reading some great Aperture 3 blogs (such as http://photo.rwboyer.com/) and a lot of frustrated forum posts about the pain people are having converting their libraries from Aperture 2 to Aperture 3.

After some painful experimentation I'm happy to report that I've found a simple solution that has be relatively pain free merging about 10 managed libraries with about 100,000 photos into one referenced library.

The problems: Lots of people have been reporting problems trying to upgrade libraries to Aperture 3. Migrations run overnight and then crash right at the end... etc, etc, etc... Lots of discussion about repairing all your libraries in Aperture 2 before you start upgrading... etc, etc, etc...

The solution: DO NOT TRY TO UPGRADE YOUR EXISTING LIBRARIES!!! Instead create a new Aperture 3 library(s) and IMPORT your old library(s) into it. The key point here is that Aperture 3 can import from earlier library formats without upgrading them. So far this process has been almost problem free for me.

My issues: The only issues I had with this process were with a couple of libraries that I had copied to a Linux NAS device. Apparently Aperture libraries do NOT like being stored on non-MacOS formatted drives (I knew this about external FAT USB drives, but I had mistakenly assumed that *nix XFS would be ok). Fortunately, I had alternate backups of these libaries on Mac formatted external drives (redundancy is your friend :-).

Bicycle Army at Papa Charlies

Bicycle Army is the BAND, and Papa Charlie's is the BAR at Lutsen Mountains ski area. These are my first real pictures trying out my new Nikon D700's low light capabilities (I'm impressed!)


Nikon D700, ISO 3200, 85mm, F1.8



Nikon D700, ISO 3200, 85mm, F1.8

New camera on the way!

I just sold the older (backup) of my two Nikon camera bodies on EBay, as well as my professional MiniDV video camera, and I just ordered a new Nikon D700.

I'm excited about the dramatically improved low light performance of this camera (the D700 uses the same full frame sensor as the D3 which can basically see in the dark!)

Go Daneen!!!

Deb (mom) and Mae (big sister) cheering for Daneen (11) cranking the Slalom course at Trollhaugen (below)!

Camera Equipment For Sale

Camera equipment FOR SALE as of 2/8/2010:



Nikon D200 (body only)



Nikon SB600 flash



Tamron 70-300 F 4-56 TELE-MACRO

Prices: Make an offer (I'm putting them up on EBay ASAP with $0 reserve!)

Eyes on the prize

Mae Hanzlik is all focus on her way to winning her age group in a ski race at Andes Tower Hills outside Alexandria, Minnesota.



Annalise Iwen is equally focussed on the way to winning her age group.

How does a redneck open a bottle of wine?

Groom's dinner: 50+ guests, fancy catered meal, plenty of Busch Light, and apparently nobody has ever needed to open a bottle of wine in the house before...

Redneck solution: Powertools!



Never underestimate the power of American ingenuity!

Tool shed gothic

A portrait of Terry and Laurie (parents of the bride) in Terry's tool shed after the groom's dinner.