Warning: This is another one of me just spouting stuff off.  It's probably going to be long and wander all over the place.

I really am not sure where I want to start this post, so I'll just jump right in and see where it goes.

It's almost a guarantee that if I'm in DC and taking pictures (especially at night), someone will ask me if I'm a photographer.   My normal answer is "No, I just like taking pictures".  I don't know why people ask me this...  it might be the camera bag (which I don't often have), the camera (not that impressive, looks like just about 90% of other decent cameras, IMO), or maybe it's just that they see me taking pictures of stuff other than the usual tourist targets.  Anyway, the reason I'm going on about this is that I was thinking today about being (or not being) a photographer.  Note to wife: Don't worry, I'm not talking about a career change or anything.

When exactly does one consider oneself "a photographer", as opposed to just being a geek with a camera?  Haven't really come up with any kind of decent answer for that.  The reason I was thinking about it is because of my train ride this morning.  Occasionally, I'll get on the train and think about which side I want to sit on, in case there's a decent picture to be taken on one side as opposed to the other.  I think "Photographers" think about stuff like that all the time...  Geeks with cameras rarely do.  If I were a "photographer", I would have been thinking about that this morning and might have been able to get a picture of one of the most incredible sunrises I've ever seen in DC.  Hence, the title of my post... 

If I were awake enough to be thinking, there's a small chance I would have remembered to sit on the right side of the train.  The views on the left are fairly boring, especially in the morning.  The right side has a nice view when going over the Potomac.  Even if the windows are dirty (which is usually the case), you can generally get a decent shot if you use a wide aperture.  However, I was barely moving, let alone "awake", so I didn't think about any of that until I saw an absolutely incredible picture waiting to be taken that I missed.  Theoretically, being awake might have been a good thing this once.

Warning: Sudden topic change below!

Here's a few of the "technical difficulties" I was talking about in my previous post...

Starting tomorrow, I'll be in the woods with a bunch of other peeps driving over and through stuff, trying not to break my Jeep.  Unfortunately, my Jeep hasn't been behaving very well, so I've had a lot of work to do on it this week.  Hopefully, I've done enough to make sure I'm not stuck in the woods with a broken Jeep.  If not, I'll have spare parts and friends with me. ;)  So, I've been busy wrenching whenever possible.

Unfortunately, that has been interrupted repeatedly by work.  We're on our third messaging server failure this week (and it's only Thursday!).  The first one wasn't that bad, and was easily fixed by beating up our virus scanner.  The second one was critical (one step short of complete meltdown) and took a lot of time to fix.  Today's crash we're still investigating, but it looks like a simple memory leak that has gone undetected till now.  Anyway, troubleshooting and fixing all this stuff has sucked a fair amount of time as well.

Add Shmoocon to that and I've pretty much got no time left at all.  On top of all that, toss in a computer that doesn't want to recognize my USB reader and the chances of getting some pictures up are pretty much gone.

In spite of the universe conspiring against me this week, I have a full 2GB card and a half full 4GB card of images from my camera!  I'll see what I can do to get at least one up today...  Might be able to pull a few off during lunch.

See ya!