About

About PNW Lens

PNW Lens is a comendium of photo galleries and a photography blog.

I’m a frogtographer…wait, I meant photography enthusiast (though I love taking pictures of my small backyard frogs) who lives in the PNW.

What you’ll find on this website

Galleries

This website is home to many of my images. They may be images of local events, travel photos, birds, landscapes. Not just images of the PNW…though that’s where I live so many tend to be from there.

You might find some are available for free download (though you can always say thanks by attributing the image and linking back to it, making a donation, or visiting my Buy Me a Coffee page), and you might find some that you can purchase for download or even find the occasional printed item for sale.

This website also has an annex site, Collection, which houses some of my favorite images in a different format and also has facilities for prints or private galleries should I ever take to doing portraits for individuals. The focus, there, is less blog and less quantity.

For more information about terms of use for photos on this site, you can visit the privacy and terms page.

Journal

Photo Journal

Photo journal entries are short posts about individual images. Often, you might find that there’s an attached map of where the image was taken (if it’s of a specific location).

Posts

You’ll also find some posts in other categories from a look at photography books, to thoughts about photography software, to musings on “mindful” photography…it generally depends on what I feel inspired to write about at the time.

Glossary

I put this here in case I forget to add it later. Currently, there’s not a glossary on this website. However, I may add one if I start wanting to add terms to posts about photography. Yes, there are an overwhelming amount of photography “how-to” sites, but it’s nice to have something that automatically links terms when you write about a subject.

A bit of the history of this website

Several years ago now I started a blog called PNW & Beyond. In a nutshell, traffic grew but it (like many other things) was thrown off by the pandemic. It took some time to recover and I also spent too much time trying various different things — some of which worked (blog posts and event listings) and some of which didn’t (general forums and too many different post types).

But I am growing older and finding that I need to judisciously choose what I spend “computer time” on as sitting at a desk for too long impacts my health. So I found the need to start scaling down that website and not trying to do everything under the sun that I’d set out to do. My favorite activities that keep me happy and healthy are cycling, walking around with a camera, and going places, spending a smaller amount of that time on photo developing or blogging. I’m looking forward to getting out with a camera more, again, and getting back to creating more photos.

In the age of AI, one might wonder whether photography is “worth it.” That depends on what you would mean by “worth it.” If you’re trying to make a bunch of money off of stock photography, good luck! But, as I say on the homepage, I’m an “amateur.” I do photography more from the fun and hobby aspect of it. I’d love to do the UW photography certificate program and, sure, I’d love to make some money at it. I would love to do some people and pet portrait photography, for instance, but I don’t want to start a photography studio or make photography into a full-time business. I want to keep doing photography for the love of doing photography.

About me: Cheryl Dimof

I live in Poulsbo, WA on a backyard detention pond that gives me lots of opportunities to watch birds and photograph frogs (interestingly, I don’t actually take many bird photos from my backyard due to the setup). Currenly, I live with my husband and a demanding Siamese cat, but have two adult daughters who no longer live at home (though one returns frequently).

I got my first “real” camera — a Canon AE1 Program (which I’m tempted to find and try out to recall what the experience of that was even like) for my sixteenth birthday and took photography in high school, developing my own black and white prints.

I had inclinations to do something “creative” — writing, photography, journalism, but found myself dissuaded in lieu of getting a “real” profession.

So I spent most of my adult life between bouts of being an Occupational Therapist (mostly working in skilled nursing and rehab facilities) and stretches of being a stay at home mom, which didn’t leave a lot of room for purchasing camera gear.

But life changes and I was able to retire early to attend to family issues and I never went back to work as a therapist. In the absence of needing to earn a large income, I found that I no longer really liked trying to write freelance — sending out query letters and such — and I started a blog (actually make that plural). But I’ve written more about that above.

My favorite things to do, though, are to get outdoors — hiking, cycling, or walking about with a camera and trying to find birds. Reading (mostly fiction now) is high on that list. I still like to write — I sometimes feel inclined to write blog posts, but don’t enjoy it if I feel like I have to pump one out on a daily or weekly basis and I like writing just for fun, though I’ll likely never finish that fiction!

Thanks for visiting.