.:. interests

I've had fun with lots of different hobbies and projects of interest.

Here are some of them.

Photography - My most favourite medium is black and white. When I had my own darkroom this was lots of fun. For several years I was a wedding photographer and all developing and printing for that was done in a lab. My interest lagged for some years but with the advent of the digital camera I have become inspired once more to pursue this hobby.
Below is a panorama consisting of 5 shots stitched together in Paint Shop Photo Album. The scene is the Chieng Tung Valley in Northern Burma.

The camera I used was an Olympus C-8080 8MP Digital Camera with 5x Optical Wide Zoom. It was an awesome camera. I then replaced with a Nikon D80 which I got in May 2008 as a retirement gift to myself. I also bought the 18mm - 200 mm lens. The D80 is a lot heavier than the C-8080 but took much sharper photos. It cost a pretty penny but was been worth it. Then along came the mirrorless Nikon Z series of cameras. I saved up and bought myself a Nikon Z6 II. Wow! What a difference! I am so impressed and am enjoying taking photos, and lots of them.

You can buy the latest and greatest Nikon camera at Amazon
I've also added a smaller Lumix which is much lighter and takes good photos plus videos. I purchased this in 2016 which I was expecting a visit back to Halbi land. The visit did not eventuate but the camera remains...
And, of course now I've updated my phone to a Samsung S10 which also takes marvellous photos on the fly. How the world has changed and continues to change.
PaintShop Pro - Though I consider myself a neophyte with using PaintShop, I have developed skill as I've used it to improve my digital photos and to create my own artwork. I've used PaintShop since its early days.
- Check out Corel PaintShop Pro for the latest and greatest version of this software.
Photoshop and Lightroom have become tools of choice in the digital photo world. I have a basic photographers subscription to the Creative Cloud which helps keep me up-to-date with both products as well as several others which are included.
I've also added On1, which is powerful and has great support for budding photographers and fiddlers of results.
Stamp Collecting - This hobby is abeyance, sort of. My stamp albums have been stored in a variety of places. Over the years I've saved the stamps from letters I've received in hopes that when I "retired" and had loads of time I'd get around to organising them all in albums. Either that or one of my nieces or nephews will inherit a very large store of unsorted stamps from all over the world. Now that I've retired I sort of started to work a little on getting all the years of collected stamps into one place so I can work on them during the cold winter evenings.
Star Trek - I've been a trekie fan since way back having watched the original Star Trek series through several times. I enjoyed "Star Trek The Next Generation" but have not had the chance to see the whole series. My all time favourite has to be "Star Trek Voyager" - I've seen the whole series through 7 or more times so far. I watched it on the Hallmark Channel while in Asia, and now have my own set of DVDs. You can get the whole Voyager series on DVD at

The social and interpersonal issues addressed are great.
Genealogy - My family's roots go back to England, Scotland and a few other places. As I have time I research more of the family tree. This is a most fascinating yet time consuming hobby. I am I'm meandering through my family tree.

Surfing the Internet - Who doesn't enjoy doing this. Only trouble is there's too much to look at and investigate and too little time to pursue all one's interests.

.:. a word for now

The Lord is good. His unfailing love continues forever, and his faithfulness continues to each generation.

Psalm 100:5