After a lot of work, I am pleased to reveal the new stantonchampion.com. The last version of this site (hosted on Tumblr) had been around since April, 2011 – which was an eternity ago. Since that time:

• Mobile has gone from an afterthought to something central in web design. Responsive tools have emerged to enable this, like Bootstrap.
• HiDPI displays (like Apple’s Retina Display) have become the standard for nearly everyone. Low resolution images are no longer good enough.
• SSL is no longer an option. Encryption everywhere is now the standard.

I wanted to bring my website up to the standards of the modern web, but more importantly I wanted to build myself a nice place to showcase my photos and writing.

When traveling with your camera, it often helps to know the phase of the moon. That said, if you’re not a walking moon phase calendar, simply paying attention to your surroundings can be a good fallback. Such was the case for me one night before I took this photo when I happened to look out the windows of the Google office and see an almost full moon rising over downtown. I immediately opened PhotoPills, saw that the full moon was the next night, and began formulating a plan.

Waking up early can be a great way to find photos, and on this trip to Zürich I was lucky to find this early morning scene of boats in the fog. I was moving quickly looking for subjects, and I ended up shooting this entirely handheld without setting a tripod. The resulting photo worked well, although at ISO 6400 it is a bit noisy.

Glendalough is one of those places with immense beauty where I just wasn’t feeling the scenery on the day I visited, so I felt incredibly lucky to get this photo. There were so many ingredients for a great photo, including amazing scenery, fantastic ruins, and a spectacular glacial lake. However, scenery is never enough – you also need good light, good shadows, and good clear atmosphere. Even more importantly, you need good timing. On this particular day, those things just weren’t clicking – especially the timing.

Mike’s Camera in Denver has a yearly “zoo day” where they allow zoo visitors to check out camera equipment for free and try things around the zoo. On this particular zoo day, I grabbed a Nikon 28-300 lens and used it around different parts of the animal exhibits. The lens didn’t wow me too much, but I was able to snag this photo of a painted lorikeet in the bird exhibit.