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About Me Camera Bag Hike Photos Other Photos Site Map Photo Magic
First I want to thank you for visiting my website. My name is Jim Olsen and my age is seventy something. I have always liked hiking and photography, but until I retired in January of 1997, I didn't really have much time for either. As for the photography, I took a lot of photos when I was traveling all over the world with the Navy , and more on family trips, but I was never satisfied with them. They didn't have the quality I was striving for. Probably a combination of poor camera equipment and a bad photographer. All my life I have loved reading National Geographic magazine, and was very impressed with the photos shown on those pages. That's what I wanted. It became my dream, to capture photographs like those.
I guess this story begins when I was having heart trouble in my 59th year and underwent a triple bypass operation. The doctors told me that if I wanted to continue living, I had to change my ways, by walking at least two miles a day and learning to eat right. That was when my life began to change. If walking was good, then hiking had to be even better. It must have been good for me, as I have lived almost 12 years beyond that operation. It hasn't all been rosy though, I lost my wife of 44 years to diabetes. After I recovered from the bypass operation I decided it was time to retire. I needed a few months to finish up some computer programming work that I was doing for Rockwell International and Boeing Aerospace, at an Air Force testing facility where I was employed. After completing that work, I retired at age 60. I mention this because having been a software programmer helped me in building this web site. I have done all the programming myself, including the Perl routines that track visitors, and the animated buttons using CSS code. The buttons are not images, they are text boxing codes. The spiral edge and album texturing are also my own design. For the hiking, I needed someone to hike with. I found a group working at Boeing that went out fairly often, so I began hiking with them. Since I was taking photos on the hikes and wanted to give copies to my hiking friends, I tried sending the photos by E-mail. That didn't work out too well, as it overloaded the computer system at Boeing, where most of them worked. I was told not to do it any more and the suggestion came up of building a website where everyone could visit and look at the photos. That was the beginning of this website. When I first started hiking with the Boeing group, I purchased an Olympus C-2500L 2.5 megapixel digital camera, a fixed lens SLR with 3x optical zoom. I found it produced better color and sharpness than any of my previous film cameras, so I was hooked on digital. Also not having to develop the film was great. As time progressed, I wanted something better, like a camera with interchangeable lenses. So I bought one of the new Canon Digital Rebels that had just become available. I really liked it and started buying different kinds of lenses to improve what I could capture with it. I asked a photographer friend to help me learn to use them and I started getting the kind of photographs that I had always wanted. From there I upgraded to better quality lenses and cameras as they became available, which gave me even better photographs. With better photographic equipment, I started looking for interesting things to photograph. Those pictures can be found on my extra photo pages, Other Photos. You will find a large assortment of photos there. These photos are free for the public to look at and even use if they want. They are fairly low resolution and do not print out well, but they look pretty good on the computer screen. If you decide you want to use my photos, please give me credit and a link to my photo site. Thanks.... 
About Me Camera Bag Hike Photos Other Photos Site Map Photo Magic
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