John1Pa's profile

John1Pa

56, Male - Eons member since Aug 15, 2006

View all favorite photos

Relationship

Married

Hometown

Broomall, Pennsylvania

Places I've been

Neptune, New Jersey; Paris, France

Education

Marple-Newtown High School - 1968 to 1971
Penn State University, BA; Philosophy - 1971 to 1974
Drexel University, MS; Library Science - 1975 to 1976

More about me

I spent much of my career in IT and computer networking with small high-tech start-ups, although I now work for a major pharmaceutical company. I lived/worked in Paris for about 18-months in 1991-92.

My major hobby is photography, which I have been into since high-school. My personal Flicker page contains selected digital photos that I have taken over time. This represents those images that I am personally most pleased with. Although it is strictly amateur and volunteer, I also do photographic “commissions” for local organizations and events. My pictures can show up in marketing materials and local newspapers that way. Even though I am not accepting money for my photography (yet), at the prompting of my wife, I have “branded” myself and created a web site, which is here; Lens and Lumen. Her dream, if not mine, is that this may someday turn into a modest source of retirement income. As my one expensive vice, I do have a pile of very nice pro-grade camera gear (that has cost me an obscene amount of money).

Beyond Flickr, there are two photography web sites that I use regularly and highly recommend. The first is DPReview, which contains detailed technical reviews of every make and model of digital camera made. They also have very active chat forums that I read from time-to-time and occasionally participate in.

The other photography website I use is called The-Digital-Picture. This site is run by an individual professional photographer and it focuses almost exclusively on Canon gear. The value of this site is in its excellent and objective reviews of Canon (and some 3^rd-party) lenses.

We have about 3-acres of landscaped property in semi-rural SE-Pennsylvania, and I spend a lot of time doing flower gardening from March through October. For the last few years my focus has been on raising perennials from seed. The Rudbeckia in this background is an example.

Another thing that I do for fun is browse Wikipedia. Even when I was a kid I’d love to just sit and read the encyclopedia from cover to cover. I am “into” history, especially ancient and medieval periods, and what I like to do is pull the date-page for the day and see all the different stuff that happened on that day through time. Yea, I know, weird!

My own ancestors first came to the US in the 1630 “Winthrop Fleet” (the Massachusetts Bay Colony that founded Boston). We can actually find his name in the passenger list. They then moved on to Martha’s Vineyard for a few generations, and then to Vermont and New York state and I was born in Pennsylvania. I am the 12^th generation of my family in this country, but with no children, that’s all folks.

Activities