A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words - a collage

I've written about just about every aspect of my life, my thoughts, my beliefs, my politics, my family. In almost every hub, the picture I have used has been one I have taken myself. My love of photography began as an occupational hazard. You work for a small town newspaper - you are your own photographer.

Back in those days we shot film, which was expensive. You'd go out on your story hoping to get "the money shot" that your editor would like. When I became editor we'd grown to the point I had a part-time photographer. I knew enough to know I needed to tell the him what I had in mind, but encourage him to take the shot he saw. Eventually we went big-time: digital. The world of photojournalism was revolutionized, even for a small weekly newspaper.

The digital world also opened up a world of photography for me. I could take a hundred shots and glean a handful of good ones out of the effort. I could crop a poorly constructed picture down to something I could be proud of (as many of these are!) This technology freed me to document the loves of my life with abandon: my family, my garden and our travels. HubPages limits me to twenty photos per hub, so the major challenge of this hub was to widdle my choices down to twenty. The fact that I am not willing to put my family's likenesses on the World Wide Web helped my discipline greatly.

I guess this hub is my way of saying thank you for the honor so many of you paid me recently in the 100 Best New Hubbers of 2011 voting. This is my way of giving you something back - from my heart.