www.groucho.org (formerly www.totalsham.com)

Holy cow, has it really been almost five months since I updated the front page?

Well, I have been working on the site - all the old content is back, and I've been adding more photos. (Almost 5,000 now, though some are duplicates.) I'll highlight a few specifics in the next few days. I have been battling with Lightroom to get colors that I am happy with, and I think I've finally got the issues licked. Meanwhile, some albums have different versions, with old ones still existing but hidden, just there for older hotlinks to them.

I also have a Pentax K20D pre-ordered (whoo!), so I'll be continuing to add a lot more content in the coming months! I also hope to do a few reviews and some comparison shots between different lenses as well as some other articles.

Now, hopefully I'll actually do some of these updates!

The content should reappear very soon, hopefully....................

Update, Sunday night: I'm still ironing out a couple little bugs but the site is mostly functional and I'm re-adding photos as fast as I can.

Yesterday, we took my son Jack to Seabreeze, a small amusement part just north of Rochester. Some photos are here.

My son Jack had a great time, it was his first time riding some rides solo...

He even rode Bear Trax, the kiddie-sized coaster! He ended up riding five times and loved it, the only thing he didn't like was getting off it!

This was also my first chance to use my newest lens, the Pentax 10-17mm fisheye. It was a ton of fun!

I've added some fireworks photos, both from my father's boat in the boating section, and from the usual Fourth of July fireworks, in the new events section.

The boat photos are a little unusual, as the boat was rocking in the wind and waves!

I got some non-firework photos in the boating section that I like, too.

In other news, it looks like turning off slideshows has helped my hosting errors - I haven't had any since then. It looks like search engines following those links were really doing the main damage. Bluehost has also upped their bandwidth, and the site does seem pretty snappy. Hopefully things are looking up...

I'm not very happy with my web host, as I've had multiple (as many as 42) "CPU Exceeded" errors that take the site down every day for the past four weeks or so. I am going to switch web hosts (away from Bluehost and somewhere that isn't so draconian about taking your site down with even the slightest amount of traffic) before long but this should help for now, as slideshows are relatively hard on the web server.

If you used them, then I apologize; they may make a re-appearance when I switch hosts (which hopefully will be a "clean" transfer with no data lost.)

I just added some photos from the Euro Car Day show from a few weekends ago. It was mostly British cars like this MG...

We went as Lotus was the featured marque this year. Or "Rotus" as some call it!

You can view the rest of the gallery here. It includes a couple more of the Elan photos as shown in the update below this one.

OK, only two new shots this time, and they're there because I wanted to use them on a forum. :)

First, it looks like exif data isn't appearing consistently now. I'm trying to determine if it's the fault of Adobe Lightroom or ImageMagick, and caused by resizing, watermarking, or both. Argh! I hope to have it sorted soon. I'm suspecting watermarking, from what I can see so far. But the problem did seem to start occuring regularly with Lightroom-processed images, and Lightroom does produce a slightly different exif than my previous apps.

On to the photo! This was taken with my trusty Zenitar 16mm fisheye, held out in the 70 mph wind as I drove along. Don't try this at home! It was a little nervewracking even with my big Op/Tech strap wrapped around my wrist twice. This comes from my .

I've added photos from our 2002 honeymoon in Romania. I still need to port over my comments (written for my old gallery), but the photos should all be there any moment now. 180 in total plus two black & white conversions.

Usually, the first thing that people ask when I tell them that we went to Romania for our honeymoon is if one of us is from there. Nope, as far as I know, my wife and I don't have a drop of Romanian blood in our bodies. I read an article about it in a travel magazine and was instantly fascinated by it. Further research led me to decide that it would be quite an interesting adventure to visit... and it surely was!

This particular photo was taken in the Bicaz Gorges. If my memory serves me, the tunnel ahead was known as the "Neck of Hell". The Gorges were beautiful and amazing. You can find larger versions of this as well as the color version in the gallery.