I ‘follow’ my own blog (someone has to) if for no other reason than to be able to see what others see when it launches to the net. Sort of a quality control procedure I suppose. I rarely find anything wrong although with a little help from my old business associate Andrew in Australia I did learn that I had the settings for photo display set incorrectly and that anytime I posted a pic from my iPhone it was displaying in a very tiny pixel framework. It had nothing to do with the iPhone, which delivers excellent quality with its camera, but with my ignorance. After I got over the mental rant against WordPress and set about to research the issue I was able to make the necessary corrections. Then I had to mentally apologize to WordPress. Strange things rattle ’round inside my head at times – an alternate reality that hopefully will never see the light of day. Perhaps some of you can identify with that. Oh, and thank you Andrew! And just so you know I have been looking into making another trip downunder if I can figure out how to fit a month or so into my budget. Might finally have to get serious about my connection with CouchSurfing and AirBnB.

Something I did notice all too often when I checked my site was the inclusion of an ad at the bottom that WP claimed was necessary to help offset the expense of providing free siting. I did not like it but wasn’t disgruntled enough to fork over the extra dough to make it go away. Then I noticed I was getting all those links you see connected with various places like HuffPost and OutsideMagazine with the come-on titles and scantily clad models. I have nothing against scantily clad models mind you – but just not on my site.

So, I gave in last night and upgraded to the Big Kahuna package, which is why you’ll be receiving this from richardbegone.com instead of from richardbegone.wordpress.com. Hopefully this will not disappoint those of you who might have been dropping in for the prurient trimmings that will no longer be availble. As consolation I will try to occasionally find a model or two of my own whose images can be offered up. Problem with me there is I rarely shoot anything (other than dogs) that either breathes or moves. And dead models are of little interest to anyone outside a mortuary. We’ll see. I’m going on a photo-walk tomorrow in downtown LA; maybe something interesting will pop-up.

This will be my second Google+ Photographers’ ‘walk’. The last was in San Francisco on the 14th April. I don’t think I posted anything from that walk here on the blog other than an iPhone shot of Rodeo Beach on the Marin Headlands and an errant Street Car on Polk.

I’ll make up for that now.

The start of the walk at Marina and Scott about 1400 hours:

The walk leaders, Dave Powell (r) and Chris Cabot: Dave was visiting from Tokyo where he lives and works. Chris works locally for Google.

Some of the folk who joined in for the event:

“Accidental” Models along the way:

The Post-walk Camera Throw at the pizza place:

And last but far from least from my perspective my finally being able to get a couple of decent night shots of the Golden Gate Bridge – to add to the gazillion other shots that have been made but with my prints on the image.

And then it was over:

Ok, not quite. I loved this dog-chases-ball series so I’m tacking it on: