From May 19th through June 17th, I shall be on an adventure of a lifetime cruising the Mediterranean.

The most common phrase I hear daily now from people is “are you packed yet?”…. Remember I am a guy… we don’t pack ahead of time, but I possibly will at least pack maybe 1 day before I leave. Mostly because the clothes I will take with me, I still have to wear before I go, but it would be nice to have enough wardrobe to pack a months long adventure weeks ahead of time.

Actually my biggest concern was finding care for my four kitties while I am away. So now that I have cat care taken care of, I need to tackle being able to pay up my utilities through June (quite a task that will be) and also gather up funds to keep my car in long term parking at the airport for 32 days. And that of course brings up another issue…. Due to flights back from Athens, Greece on the dates I need, that means I fly back to Philli and then to Raleigh. That is why I go to Raleigh to begin the journey and then pop over to Charlotte to get on the Airbus A300 and fly to Rome.

This bit of logistics requires me to begin and end this journey in Raleigh. And here it is Thursday night and i will be at the airport early Saturday morning… so it’s a good time to start packing… that is after I get all the clothes I need laundered and ready to go. Then i discover another issue… Just how do I cram a months worth of clothes into a piece of luggage that holds about a weeks worth of stuff.

I wonder why it is that when we drive by a dead opossum at the side of the road whe say “eww” or some other gross-like remark, either to ourself or even aloud. But when its a dead squirrel we say “ahh” or some other endearing comment about a poor misfortunate animal.

The old saying of “don’t say anything unless you have walked in their shoes” definately doesnt ring out in the ears of our congressmen. They already pay less of a percentage in taxes than we do and have no idea to know what it’s like to go shopping for dinner knowing you only have six dollars to spend for it. Give me a friggin break… there is no real effort being put into changing the screwed up financial system of the country.

If we are experiencing “Global Warming”, I wonder how long it will be before Tennessee becomes the “New Florida”. Personally I will have not problems with with 50 degree temperatures all the way till spring. The less I have to heat the house, the better off my wallet is.

It’s funny how I use to have some slight displeasure about my life being an island, living alone with cats. But over the last few months I have found quite a bit of solice in it. I still have my social outlets I visit daily, but as far as needing someone in my life to fill some kind of void… well thats not the way I see it anymore. The way I have screwed up my work, sleep and play schedule, it’s probably difficult for someone to try and be my other half anyway. But if the earth moves… then all that goes out the window and it’s a new route to take.

Beef is going to raise substantially this year… and why? Because we are using so much corn to make ethanol. Welll thats a crock of poop if you ask me. What a sad state of affairs when we are so hungry for oil that we forsake other more important aspects of life.

As I am into my seventh Autum Season here in Gatlinburg, I can look around and see such wonderous color in the trees. Thankfully we havent had a lot of hard rains or wind, which has allowed the trees to stay in color longer.

I have gone out with the camera a few times and have a Photography Experience Trip set up for tomorrow. I am sure I will fill up a memory card during the workshop and hopefully get a few more works for my gallery sales.

And speaking of Gallery sales, I can say I have been quite pleased with the number of pieces that are out in peoples homes, offices and mancaves that have sold in the last three months that I have been in the Shops at Carousel gardens. Somewhere around 50 to 60 pieces have been sold, but most of those are smaller $12-$21 items, But that still helps me buy more pigments and paper to keep motivated to make new stuff.

It’s amazing the amount of people that flock to the area in October, I am blessed to live here for sure… but then I felt blessed to have live in Florida along the coast and near the Space Center. In fact there are so many places on earth that would be wonderfully beautiful places to live.

As winter approaches, I am on a mission to make this a very enjoyable time in life for me. I am not concerned that I am up in years and live alone with cats and struggle sometimes to make ends meet. I am the type of person that looks more at what I do have that yet many may not. Sure I do not have health insurance but I seem to saty fairly healthy anyway. I may not have a retirement savings and don’t get to do a lot of things that require money. But I did get to go to the French West Indies back in February and I am heded to Venice nect June. I feed my boys "Iams" food and I eat a lot of steak, so I would say in some ways, we live like kings.

I feel I am pretty much over and forgiven myself for the crazy ass mistakes i made in May of 2010 and the following crash and burn that happened this past January. And getting through June and July was such a stomach eater. Business was slow and there were not quite so many steaks in the diet and I even had to give the boys "Friskies" a few times.

So as I enjoy the colors of Autumn without being overdrawn at the bank, selling art again and even working in the gallery a couple days a week. I couls steel the phrase "life is good" and apply it right now… But GOD is gooder!

It’s a slow day here in The Shops @ Carousel Gardens in Downtown Gatlinburg. I have had my works displayed in here for about three weeks and now I also work some shifts on weekends tending to the gallery. I have walked the floors here many times over in the last two days and have probably worn a layer of leather of my shoes in the process.

I guess all the arist in the area think the tourist want images of the Smokies, but from my experiences from my own previous galleries and this one, I think that it is not predictable what they will buy. Some of my pieces that I thought never really would sell have sold before traditional Smokies ones have.

I also have noticed, along with everyone else that my work is alive with vibrance and color. And it seems the work from the last year is at the top of the charts in vibrance. In particular the piece shown above of St. Kitts harbor (20×30), so many folks just stand and stare at it and make comments about how they love it, or it is so alive with color or that they just love water scenes. And I am thinking, why not just buy it and take it home.

I know my stuff doesn’t work in everyone’s home or office but there are very many that it will. Today I was thinking and reflecting back to my life living in Florida and I think thats where some of this off the charts vibrance is stemming from. Now mixed win with HDR processing and some other enhancements, I feel that you will agree with a person that came in here one day and looked at my display, then replied “this is not ordinary photography”.

I am so eager, excited and anxious to got to Venice next year and really let my mind and eyes feast of the sights there.

When I first started posting about New Works I had just finished, it was a pretty easy task since I was only making one or sometimes two new pieces every other week or so. But over the last few weeks, that output level has increased dramatically. In fact I have had some spurts where I created a new piece every day for three to four days in a row.

This all came about after a stretch of several months early this year where my art production went dormant. Even on a cruise to the French West Indies, I had to force myself to even take snapshots, I was in a real funk and really hate that I missed on many great sites there.

I eventually began to shake it off, but it was slow and arduous it seemed, as I managed to produce "St Kitts", a harbor scene from the island. Processed in HDR, this work began the boost into my motivation to produce and to even wipe the dust of my cameras for that matter.

A few weeks later I managed to create "Royal Enfield", another HDR image of a Royal Enfield motorcycle I spotted on St Barths Island. I also posted a listing for it on Craigs List and was discoverd by a blogger for Royal Enfield’s. He wrote an article about it in his blog and even one of the readers went online an purchased a print. That began to really motivate my production gears, and after the sale of another print and then a print of "Hog Tank", I was getting back into the swing of things.

Now as I look back over even just the last month I couldn’t name off every new piece I have done. I went through 60 DVD’s of RAW camera files and began digging and also through 55 CD’s of digitized film images. As a result so far I have 3 new Civil War scenes, done over in HDR of course. 2 Corvette works, "Copper Coupe" and "Blue Velvet". I finally finished the "Humpback of Tennessee" and after Chrysler began to follow me on Twitter, I produced "Town Car". Along with a few more that can be found in my Art of Autos Gallery .

On a photo safari to Knoxville one day I managed to at least capture the "Sun Sphere" and followed up with several other new works that have made their way into the Black Bear Art Gallery.
The nice thing about all this for those that currently have some of my works in their collections, is that due to the large number of new works, the next walk in gallery I have will most likely be of those. Most all older works that have not reached retirement (typically 10-15 on canvas and an assorted mix on fine art paper) will be close to retirement since the only way they would be printed most likely is by online order.

If you are one of those that have been to one of my galleries previously and you have a print, especially one on canvas, it could be a one of a kind in the end. There are a couple pieces that will see the the full run of the edition, due to their overwhelming popularity such as "Cabin Fever" and "Curve of Many Colors". But don’t wait too long because "Cabin Fever" is at print number 8 or 9 on canvas already, and as long as I keep my personal 22×28 canvas of it above the fireplace, it wont matter to me if it goesto retirement.

You can now keep up with new stuff and gallery news by following me on twitter @dr_sid, Facebook, Google+, RedGage and probably more.

George Eastman had a dream of everyone having a camera, but little did he ever imagine that the camera would become so automated that a human just about doesn’t even have to hold it for it to work.

I remember back in the day when cameras like the Canon AE-1 came out, with fully programmed features that allowed the user to just point and shoot and get a good exposure. A lot like a 35mm instamatic kind of camera, and thus the beginning of watering down the real “craft” of photography. At least when you used a shutter priority or aperture priority mode camera, you at least made some kind of choice about the exposure. But now a days when I mention shutter priority or aperture priority to a photographer, they look at me like I am speaking a foreign language.

Yes I almost always shoot in shutter priority mode since depth of field is what I work to achieve. Sometimes I want lots of depth and sometimes very little, and thank goodness I have a camera with a DOF preview button. and I would never capture an image on “Auto ISO”, so I guess that makes me fairly old school. But I capture images from well before I even have it framed up as to where I know wether I plan to stop motion or control the field of focus. And I typically never shoot at an ISO above 320. Of course with digital cameras there is not nearly the difference in grain/noise as there was back in the days of film.

You may think, Im thinking backwards, but actually by shooting in shutter priority mode and keeping my camera always on a hand holdable speed, if I need to fire off a quick image without the luxury of looking over my exposure setting first, at least I know it will not be too blurry because the shutter was too slow. I like to control what f/stop I will use by the shutter speed I choose.

Now with the ease of use, the multitude of effects… you can make any image into something quite artistic using photoshop filters. I have found from having my own gallery that selling straight up, non manipulated photos is not going to happen very often. People just don’t hang fine art photographs in their homes any more. One key reason… in their mind, anyone with a camera could have went to the same place and captured the same picture. I have heard it time and time again from visitors to the gallery, as they whispser to one another “I took one just like that” while looking at the displayed images.

As I go about my continuing process to create, I still like the fact that I spend 4 to 8 hours getting an image ready to where it satisfies me enough to print and hang in a gallery for sale. And at the same time creating something that no photoshop filter can do on its own.