Category Archive

We have always had phainopepla here at the Desert Photo Retreat, in fact last year a pair had a nest near the lower blind. They are a bit tough to photograph since they aren’t drawn to the seed feeders as they are bug eaters. However, they seem to like the water refection table where this one was captured. Today I stopped by the blind without a camera just to see how things are doing and one came in and took a bath!

Here is a female cardinal from last spring.   Taking care of the final tasks here at the Desert Photo Retreat, and hope to do some of my own photography tonight.  We will be open to visitors for the season beginning this weekend!  

Here is one from last year that I hadn’t shared yet. A polar bear sow and cub at sunset, Alaska Arctic.

We are now on our property and wow, there has been so much mammal and bird activity!  So busy right from the start, it is exciting!  Check out these guys from last night – funny how the big buck waited for the javelina to finish drinking before moving in.

I won’t use my real camera for a few days at least as I want everything to adjust and get use to our presence.

Well we have completely redone our main photo website! Feel free to check it out! This was a daunting task. And although we reduced the size as compared to our old website substantially, it still contains almost 3,700 pages, and almost 15,000 images! That was a lot of adjusting, writing, uploading etc.

It is funny to think, our website began about 20 years ago as a little 5 page website created with MS FrontPage with a dial up internet connection!

Our website had become very dated. It wasn’t responsive so it wouldn’t resize on mobile devices, it had random sized photos because we increased the size over the years, and it was losing it’s ranking status with Google.

Finding ourselves with extra time, thanks to the pandemic, we figured this would be our only chance to really tackle this huge project. On our other websites for the Desert Photo Retreat and Alaska Photo Tours I used WordPress. But our main website was much too large, and I know how frustrating doing your own website can be – sometimes the simplest things like spacing can make me crazy.

So, for this project, we hired Jack Brauer with Wide Range Galleries, and I’m so glad I did! I have known of Jack and his beautiful photography for years. I know many fellow photographers who have hired him in the past who also rave about his websites, and now I see why.

Jack was awesome to work with, and he has really thought of everything when it comes to a photography website. I can manage everything on the backend and it is literally easier to make changes then even WordPress. His websites are responsive, serving up different sized images depending on the device. They are perfectly designed to maximize SEO. I could go on and on, but if you are serious about your own website, be sure to follow the link above where you can read much more.