About

Contact Information:
To contact me, send an eMail addressed to patrick at the name of this site.

In Tibet, travelers are frequently called “pilgrims.” For centuries, people have traveled to the Jokhang Temple and the Potala Palace in Lhasa for spiritual growth. The outer physical travel was analogous to their inner journey. Similarly, I see my website project as an opportunity for personal growth.

After successfully working in the health care and insurance industries for decades, I want to do something creative. My undergraduate degree was in English Literature and I fancied myself a future novelist. I started taking photographs at age eight and was an early adapter of digital photography. I’ve completed an adult education certificate program in Web Development.

Blogging is the nexus of writing, photography and web design. For me, the www.patrickdowd.com project is an opportunity to regain the spirit of my youth. I have so much to learn. With the advent of digital photography, using a professional camera and achieving post-production results with sophisticated software is more technical than ever before. Blogging resides in the Internet world that changes daily; dynamic, database-driven blog publishing software is wonderful–unless a single bit of code is incorrect. Even writing for the web is different than a ponderous three hundred-page novel; it must be snappy and entertaining or the visitor has clicked through to the next site. Most challenging is identifying an audience and discovering what I have to offer. How do I tell a story that entertains, educates and allows me to share a bit of myself?

Standing waist deep in a glacier-fed stream and traveling to the opposite side of the world gets me excited. I start to see things differently; it changes my perspective. I am trying things I’ve never done before and going to new places. My desire is to think and feel things I haven’t experienced before. I have written about true experiences that sound like fiction. I want to blur the line and write fictional stories about the truth. I want share my excitement with my visitors and get you excited.

About My Website
My website has been up for over five years. Currently I use WordPress, Flickr and bluehost for my web services. Software tools I use include: Photoshop, Bridge,  Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Filezilla. The WordPress version is 2.3.2; the theme is modified from ModernPaper by Brian Gardner ; the Flickr Photo Album plug-in is by Joe Tan.

My photographic equipment is mostly Nikon. I use the D200 and have the following lenses: 12-24mm, 18-200mm, 18-70mm, 50mm, 70-200mm, 300mm and 1.7 teleconverter. I also have the SB-800 flash, tripods, a remote control and other miscellaneous gadgets. In the field, I use Wolverine Hard Disk Drives to back-up my photos. My Pentax Optio point-and-shoot is waterproof and can be submerged for up to thirty minutes. The camera phone is Sanyo. With my Nikon, I shoot in the RAW format.

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