Welcome to my new blog. So you’re probably asking, “Why you?, Why a blog?, Why now?, What’s this all about?” The short answer is, my wife made me do it. OK, that’s not true. She planted the seed and did all the really hard work, and most importantly she gave me the courage to do it. She’s already had to deal with two hacker attacks, a change of web hosts and me. (I think she’s a keeper). So what is this blog all about? In other words, why are we here? Well, it mostly going to be about photography. I have been enamored by great photographs all my life. I used to love flipping through the pages of my dad’s National Geographic magazines, and it had nothing to do with topless natives…ok, almost nothing. The point is that at various times in my life I have wanted to be a photographer, but I always found really poor excuses not to. I bought my first real camera in college, took a few photography courses, but never really took the time to learn the craft. Unfortunately, that camera met an untimely end in a river in the Wyoming wilderness, but that’s a whole other story. Fast forward to the digital era. With the instant results possible with digital my drive to really learn the craft of photography exploded and that’s where this blog comes in. You see, I am a grand champion procrastinator, in fact the English translation of the Hansberger family motto is “Of all things, don’t hurry.”  So this blog serves several purposes: It allows me to share the things I’ve learned so far about the difference between taking pictures and making photographs, it makes me accountable for learning and sharing new things as we move forward, it gives me an outlet for all the strange ideas that float through my head and its a good back-up since my other idea didn’t work out. (I was planning on using the old memory from my laptop to build a robot to help me take over the world, but then I remembered how slow that half gig of ram was in my laptop and I realized that my robot would probably be equally slow and dimwitted. And everyone knows you can’t take over the world with a robot hillbilly.) So I chose blogging.

So what can you expect in the coming days, weeks, years on these pages? I will help you make your pictures look better, and you will help me push myself to make my pictures better. Even if you only want to take better pictures of your kids, I think I can be of some help. Speaking of kids, expect to see many pictures of my son, since he is my best model. He is not yet two and he already know to pause briefly when I point the camera at him, at which time he usually says, “I’m cute!” He is a much better model than my nieces who react to the camera by either running off screaming into the night, or by striking all the latest poses they learned watching that Hannah Alabama girl.

In addition to the photo making advice, you can also expect some of the more bizarre tales from my travels, and with my day job I have a LOT of travels. I’ve already had lunch with Jesse Jackson (ok maybe not WITH, but he did eat his big mac at the table next to me in the food court,) and shared a restroom with Gen. Wesley Clark. My dad used to refer to these celebrity-type encounters as a Brush with Greatness, but I’ll leave that decision up to you.

So there you have it, fun, travel, photography and more. I’ll do my best to take the ’scary’ out of the scary words of photography like ‘exposure’, ‘apeture’, and (gasp) COMPOSITION!!!  AAAAAHHHH!  And I’ll help you add some ‘oohs’ to those ‘aaws’ of the kids. You can even follow me on Twitter or Facebook. By the way, all the photographs you see on this site will be mine unless otherwise stated. So charge up your batteries and get ready for lesson number one, coming soon.