THIS PAGE Art Birds Photographs Ideas Family Resumes Websites Blogs
HOME words images websites contact
me resume links movies meta DallasArtsRevue search
THIS PAGE Art Birds Photographs Ideas Family Resumes Websites Blogs
My father tells his story of flying into Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Bridge near San Francisco
Anna and I took our summer vacation late this year and went to California. Eventually, we'll have a page of the best of both our pictures on this site somewhere but I've been posting what I think may be my best shots on my DallasArtsRevue Member Page.
Self-portrait at very nearly 67 years of age
Till now I've avoided having my picture prominently on any of my web pages or sites, although I have shown my cat from time to time. Usually I obscure me. But since I'm now past my 67th birthday, I thought I'd celebrate myself for a change. I did this portrait with my Panasonic G2 camera and my second-favorite lens for it, the 20mm f/1.7, not exactly a portrait lens. But then it's not exactly a portrait setting.
I just set the camera on a pile of stuff on my desk and pointed it in my direction with the self-timer set. Because I didn't aim, I had to crop off most of the top, blank yellow wall. I had hardly anything in mind for it, just tilted my head down, so I could see my eyes over my reading glasses and posed comfortably.
If I started correcting things, I'd still be at it. But that wouldn't be real, and I generally attempt to, although real changes too often to catch up.
I wasn't sure the shot would work, and all the others I did in that sitting are out of focus. But this looks like the person I identify with. The stains on the shirt and the scratches on my arm and the plootches in my face are all perfectly rendered and real. I like that I am staring off into space.
Whoever I am, this is a pretty good representation.
Star Gazer Bud
I am so many different things I'm never sure which to push. I am a photographer, with a couple of sites and several photo pages [below] going. Some here on my personal site, others on DallasArtsRevue.com. But of all those, my favorite pages are of and about my family. The latest big page of family pictures is My Mother's 90th Birthday Celebration. Before that was My Father's 97th Birthday Party late last year.
I'm also a writer and editor. I do very large (that and Joel Cooner Gallery), medium (Lotus Eaters.org) and nice little (Jane Cornish Smith) websites for people, and I photograph art and I write about a lot of what I do.
Bath House Back Porch on The Richard Show.
Which brings us to this experimental page. I've been a newspaper photographer and a PR photog, so I know a little something about photographing people. But I haven't kept up with that skill, and my page of People Pictures may help me get back into it, though it grows slowly. I've started with brand new pictures, but I'll add others I've already shot and new ones when they happen.
The best of my photography pages is How to Photograph Art. It is one of my two most popular page, and I've got feedback from all over the U.S. and Europe about it. It's also the most fun, and I almost always have new ideas for things to teach with it, if I can figure out how to say and show it. My other most popular page is The Birds of the Rio Grande II.
I'm a good teacher, but I have issues with authority figures and bureaucracy. Teaching via web pages just makes more sense.
Maybe I could have been a Travel Photographer, but since my all-expenses-paid free trip to Viet Nam during Tet in 1968, I prefer travel inside the Continental USA. Anna and I went to Glacier Park in Montana in the summer of 2010, and you can see what we saw on our Glacier Park Trip Page.
I'd still love to go back to Medicine Wheel in Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains or Yellowstone. Again. I probably should track down my Viet Nam pictures and put them on this site, too, but for awhile at least, I'm happily stuck in the now.
Feather Fetish I made from a wide variety of feathers gathered at White Rock Lake
I am a photographer, writer, editor and art critic, exhibition organizer, poet, curator, promoter and website producer. Among other things. I have been a Staff Photographer for The Dallas Times Herald, Dallas NOTES from The Underground, HOOKA, The Austin Sun, The Edinburg Daily Review and had photos published in dozens of other publications around the world, including Life Magazine, The Texas Observer and the Dallas Observer.
In March 2009 I began a page of Austin Sun Photographs I shot in 1975 and 76. Forty years later on Halloween 2009 I extensively photographed our 40th Anniversary Reunion party. I love photographing parties, but no one ever hires me to do that. I also enjoy photographing art, and from time to time someone will hire me to do more of that.
I've also been a photojournalist, typesetter, community radio and TV producer, milkman, Secret Film Courier in Viet Nam, Instructor of Photography and Publication Design for honors college classes, Yellow Cab Driver, Publisher of Underground Newspapers and a Night Watchman at a Massage Parlor. I have curated exhibitions and am a published and self-published art critic — writing about art longer than anyone else in Dallas.
I used to collect jobs. Check out my resume for most of them. But in the last ten years plus, I've kept the same ones. Never know how long that will last.
My photographs have been published in dozens of publications around the world, including LIfe, Jet and Texas Monthly, and they've been exhibited in more than 90 art exhibitions.
I don't like to do the same any thing for very long, so I don't. I'm easily bored but never without something interesting to do. And I keep coming back to making photographs — especially of birds and art, and writing, editing, designing and publishing — community-based publications (including this one), although the medium keeps changing.
My Blogs
Scissor-tailed Flycatcher Executing Elegant Turnabout
My newest blog is my d7k journal is about me learning my newest camera, the Nikon D7000, because I just had to have a camera that would focus on things (like birds) that moved faster than me.
As I usually do when I get a new camera, I've started a new blog for my new Nikon D7000. I wanted a D400, but Nikon's tribulations with the nuclear meltdown in Japan and floods in Thailand have denied me that privilege, so I settled for the d7k as I call it in the banner on top of that page. I don't think anybody else but me reads it, but it's for me, not the teeming masses, although some of my camblogs amass an audience before I all but abandon them for the next one.
My Amateur Birder's Journal — more info below, takes up most of my time and effort online. About three times a week I show bird photographs from White Rock Lake in Dallas, Texas, USA and as far as Montana, Colorado and The Lower Rio Grande Valley and other places we wander. The six years of my Birder Journal is indexed here.
My favorite blog is my ThEdBlog (spelled and pronounced thed blog), which is me blogging about me publishing DallasArtsRevue and living life as I have come to understand (?) it. Those pages are illustrated with often enigmatic photographs from my personal existence.
My G2 Journal is about learning my new microFourThirds camera, the Panasonic G2. I got it in late February 2011, and I've been going through an intensified learning experience with it and its lenses. I like it because it's light and fits in my small hands, and the pictures I get with it are different enough from my usual styles, that I'm excited to show new shots with it often (but no longer every day).
Art Here Lately covers art in Dallas, less often than the birds, but usually in more depth.
I've nearly abandoned my S90 Journal that offered insights into the Canon S90 I still sometimes stuff into my pocket when I don't have a photographic agenda, or I planned to see some art and might need pictures to help me write about them later, although I usually use my G2 for all that, even if it doesn't fit in my pocket. I've also pretty much abandoned my Canon S90/S95 Accessories, Tips & Techniques, but if you own a Canon S90 0r S95, it's a handy page.
My Kindle blog is what I've been reading on the kindle and online and via CD books from the library.
In 2010 I began writing a journal about my then-new Canon s90, called The Canon S90 Journal, which was an informal journal of me learning that then-new camera. Then came Canon S90 Tips & Accessories and Canon S90 Accessory Reviews, which are still very popular even though I have mostly abandoned them.
Before all those was How to Photograph Art, which is also about photography and although not a blog, it is updated and extended often, sometimes several times a week. At about 67,256 and rising, it's the most popular of my current pages. I used to update it daily, but not lately. It may finally be finished.
J R Compton Disheveling Daisy Ballerinos
Bloggish in a photographic way is my DallasArtsRevue members page of usually very recent photographs, often of personal images.
I also cover DallasArtsRevue's exhibitions in blog style. These are huge, all in one, blog pages that include all the excruciating details in the production of our member and invitational exhibitions. The last one was The DallasArtsREVUE 30th Anniversary Member show at the Bath House Cultural Center December 5 2009 through January 2010. Before that were Fierce and The Winter Show.
Then there's Art Here Lately, which does art here lately. Art by people who live around here. Art I've seen recently and thought worthy of writing about. And photographing. I don't entirely ignore the rest of the world of art, but mostly.
I reactivated my Facebook page in the big middle of the February 2011 ice storms, and it turns out a good way to be in touch with actual friends, although I am often bored outta my mind by people I don't know and aren't really my friends, and I can see why..
Long before my s90, I wrote about learning my Nikon D200, and that led to the next, now largest entity on this list.
The Amateur Birders Journal
American White Pelicans on Night Patrol
J R's Amateur Birder's Journal is sometimes updated daily, sometimes weekly, and sometimes not at all for a while. It is my personal bird journal documenting Dallas' White Rock Lake and other places, including west to the Grand Canyon, south to The Lower Rio Grande Valley, and north to Colorado, among other places. Begun in June 2006, the journal was indexed here until I just couldn't keep it up anymore, but the current journal is always here.
There's also a bibliography of useful books, a links page to other lake and bird and other sites and a Feedback page and dozens of others linked from the index.
Art
DallasArtsRevue includes — in its more than twelve hundred web pages — art, art stories, art criticism and news, views and reviews of, by and for the artists of Dallas, Texas, USA.
My DallasArtsRevue Supporting Member page always includes some of my more recent photographs.
I'm the editor, publisher and writer. It's the main reason I'm still here.
J R Compton White Daisy Open Book digital photograph
hinged wood box, white daisy flower and orange daisy petalsPhotographs
The great love of my life is photography, and there are many photographs on this and my other sites.
One of my favorite ongoing photographic series is of dead flowers. Because there are several pages on my various sites of those, I now have a Dead Flowers Index, although I have not yet tracked down all my dead flower pix there.
Photographs are everywhere.
I love photographing people's houses. Here's one approach to that idea; it's Somebody's House in East Dallas. And here's a whole other way of showing someone else's home — Maravilla for Mom.
Poemagraphics combined poetry and photographs many years ago when websites with pictures loaded much more slowly than they do now, so the pictures were smaller.
Fire Down the Street September 5 2011
Websites
I do websites besides this one, including huge ones for Joel Cooner Gallery and DallasArtsRevue, but I've been doing fewer in the last few years. Many people confuse my Amateur Birder's Journal with a website, but it's actually part of this one.
I do good sites, sometimes great ones. My sites are simple. I'm not a great technician, but I believe that technology serves some website clients very well. For most, however, simple is better and it is more likely to keep working.
My latest website was for artist Jane Cornish Smith.
I like working on artist's sites, because I like artists. It only gets expensive when they need to show everything they've ever done. Better to start with now and add new work as it is created. That way people see the energy and soul and respond with energy of their own. The important ones will want to get involved by checking your page often.
The problem with websites is that putting them up is only the beginning. No one goes back to sites that don't constantly add energy by updating, adding and changing. That takes work, and website owners either have to do it themselves or pay somebody else to.
When I have time and patience, I offer free advice for people who have or want a site:
My Websites page lists the sites I've done and am doing. There's a lot of variety there. Somewhere there may even be a page of My Prices, although they've probably gone up since then.
What You Have to Do to Get Your Own Website includes what I (or your webbie does, will do, needs to do) plus major things that need doing that your webbie cannot do: info about your URL; your Web Host; some Warnings; how to organize your site; pictures; and Keywords
The I.S.P. page includes important info about Internet Service Providers, the very different Web Host, Domain Registration and some very important yet usually difficult to come by information about How to Change Web Hosts, and How to Promote Your Website, something most website owners will not do, so they will not get the traffic they say they want.
What should you put on your pages?
That's easy. You.
Although it can become one, a website should not begin as an archive of who you were back when. It should reflect who you are now, and what you did yesterday, what you're working on today and thinking about doing tomorrow.
Put your latest work on the top, so people know you've changed the page and the site since the last time they visited. Online, the bottom line is on the top. Many people won't scroll down if what's on the top is the same old thing. That's why I love doing my blogs, because I keep getting to put my newest images on top.
Dusty Dump Truck with truncated Dallas Skyline from ThEdBlog
Ideas
Spiritual — The Meta Index includes links to my photographic pages of SolstiCelebrations and other bits of magic.
Images of personal and public magic
My metaphysical and philosophical writings about intimacy and prayer and some other stuff.
A Meditation of the Five Ancient Elements, and
J R Compton's Cosmic Coping Kit of Metaphysical & Other Knowledge
1,586 Movies Reviewed — from the big screen, DVDs and VHSs. Usually short and sweet reviews, but I can ramble about movies.
Family
My Mother Celebrating Her 90th Birthday — She's the one in the middle
My Mother's 90th Birthday in early 2011
My Father's 97th Birthday in late 2010
The Clare Family Story - my mother, Mary Clare Compton's family story
Back Home in Indiana - my father, John T. Compton's Story
The Ballad of Harold & Emily - my mother's parents' story
The Fire - my father's parents story
After all these years of me documenting family events and occasions, almost nobody bothers me when I point my camera their way. They just go about their business, whatever they're up to. And that suits me fine. They are willing participants in my photo essays, and my personal joy is to document them doing it.
Other Family stories — some illustrated by me, others not — include Pictures from a Reunion, my photographs of our 2008 Clare Family Reunion in Colorado; and Maravilla for Mom, photographs of, in and around their home of 40 years before my parents moved to San Antonio to retire. That page was a loving visual essay of many of the family, friends and rooms, spaces, places and art that comprised their home — so Mom can visit it whenever she wants.
Resume
My full resume
The shows my photographs have been in
Exhibitions I've produced and/or curated.
My logo designs
Birds of Paradise - One of the hundred+
plant species
where my parents lived for 40 Years.
from my photo essay, Maravilla
for Mom she requested so she could remember that place.
My latest email address is always on this site's Contact page, which is not anywhere near as entertaining as the Contact page for DallasArtsRevue.
