The Friends of the National Zoo (FONZ) photoclub is going to be holding a photographic gallery show on Friday March 12th at the Washington School of Photography in Bethesda Maryland. The theme of the show is Wildlife and Wonders: The FONZ Photo Club.

Please join us for the opening of the show on Friday March 12 from 6-9PM.  All sales will support the construction of the new Clouded Leopard facility at the zoo's Conservation and Research Center in Front Royal, VA.

The gallery is located at the following address:

Washington School of Photography
4850 Rugby Avenue, Bethesda, MD 20814
(301) 654-1998

My Sunflower Sunset photo will be one of 50 photos that will be show at this show. I decided to print this photo as a 16x20 gallery wrap canvas for the show. The canvas arrived yesterday afternoon and I'm very happy with how it looks as a canvas print. I hope to see you there on Friday March 12th.

This past weekend a historic snow storm hit the mid-Atlantic region and dumped about 30 inches of snow on average across the DC, Maryland, Virginia area. As I'm typing this another storm is on its way to hit us with another 10 inches of snow.


During the weekend snow storm I took hundreds of photos of the storm and the day after results. I also took the opportunity to setup several cameras to do some photographic experimentation. My first experiment was a time lapse of the snow fall on the trees in my backyard. I setup a camera on a tripod and set an intervelometer (Canon TC-80N3) to record an image every 30 seconds for the next several hours.

One of my major goals for this year is to finish planning and start my Civil War Infrared photography project in anticipation of the sesquicentennial (150th) anniversary of the Civil War next year. In a nutshell my project is to photograph the Civil War battlefields using an Infrared converted digital camera. You can view some of the images in this Flickr set.

I have always found the study of the past and history an interesting subject. I continue to research and learn about the history of the world in my spare time and listen to several history based podcasts on my daily commute to work. I'm not sure if I'm just wired that way or maybe it was an influential history teacher in my past that generated my interest in History. You can't chalk it up to older age since I have always been interested in the subject (especially Military history.) 

Many people could care less about history and have no idea why I would want to waste my time on such a project. I recently saw the following article in my feed reader and it gave me a pause to think about how people think and view history.

Proof that History puts people to sleep
Gary Crabbe Enlightened Images

"However, with my current book project, the minute I tell people (or they sense) that it's a history book, they fall asleep. They turn off. They tune out. They switch off their radar. It's like you suddenly become a non-important entity. In all of my career, I've never experienced anything like this. But it's happened so often, among so many people at so many levels, that I'm now 1000% convinced that it's purely related to the history aspect." [ read more ]

So with this in mind I'm opening up the following questions to my readers.

Do you tune out history?

Do you have interest in history based photographic projects as an art viewer or maybe an art buyer?

Please leave a comment below.

I ask this question more out of curiosity rather than determining the future of this project. As a creative person and image maker I'm still going to proceed as planned no matter what the response. I'm just curious if history based projects are doomed to failure from the start.