This blog is 8 years old today. I posted my first entry on June 10th, 2003 and have added a total of 548 more since then, averaging one post every 5 and a half days. My posting rate has gone down over the last couple of years as I’ve started concentrating more on my photoblog but this site has become a great vehicle for long-form posts and tutorials that don’t fit well with the photoblog format.

Looking back over the early posts, it’s clear that a great deal of water has passed under the bridge since I started writing. I’ve posted goodbyes to my mother and my wife’s step-father, news of the construction of our home, a job change, first days at school, trips to Guatemala, hints at my first forays into HDR and reports after teaching HDR workshops, pictures at an exhibition, news of our family vacations (and here, and here, and here) and umpteen other unrelated, though interesting or topical, snippets.

Although the focus has definitely shifted very much more towards photography over the last 3 or 4 years, I’ll try to keep the content varied moving forward. The older the blog gets, the more I am delighted I started it all those years ago since, as my memory becomes increasingly unreliably, it’s great to have this continuous stream of family history to look back through and refresh the neurons with.

Today is the 7th anniversary of the first post to this blog. Back in June 2003, I imagined the blog purely as a way to keep the rest of my far-flung family up to date on news but in the following years, it’s morphed more towards photography than news (not that that’s necessarily a bad thing).

Moving forward, expect more photography articles and tutorials (these are definitely the most popular posts on the site) along with the usual collection of images, background technical information and general chit-chat.

Thanks to everyone who reads the blog – I know you’re out there even if you don’t comment a lot

0910-Cameron_10th_Birthday-13, originally uploaded by wilsonloftin.

Our oldest “baby” (second from the right in this picture) turned 10 last Wednesday. It hardly seems any time since I was pushing a stroller around our neighbourhood late at night trying to get our little, colic-suffering bundle of joy to stop screaming and go to sleep. I’m glad to say that most of the screaming these days if of the “scream for joy” variety, thank goodness.

We celebrated on Friday night when a group of his friends came over for a food fight, hot tubbing, marshmallow roasting and many, many hours of video game playing. They had a blast and, thankfully, kept the whipped cream outside and off the carpets.

On Saturday morning, we got together with all the guys in the Cub Scout den and played Blazer Tag, something that was greatly appreciated by Dad as well as the boys. There’s something amazingly therapeutic about racing around a darkened, 3 storey arena blasting people with a lazer gun