Hello Steemit

That's me. Well, sort of.

Hi; my name is Ben. I'm an older fellow, trying to take life easy these days. The picture of me above is a couple decades old; I show it here because this, to me, looks most like me. Age has turned my hair grey, and my eyes have been fixed so I no longer wear glasses, but... when I look at this, I think "yes, that's me." But...

This is what I actually look like today

I go by "fyngyrz" because one of my lifelong interests is playing guitar; I have been playing for fifty years now, mostly rock, blues, and folk music.

My favorite guitar and amp

Here is link to page on my blog with a sample of my playing:

A tribute to Led Zeppelin

Some of my other interests include consciousness theory, photography, radio, reading, writing, martial arts, cats, and converting the old church I live in with my very creative partner, Deb, into a home:

Our home, before Deb replaced all the yellow stained glass.
We built that little house for the local feral cats, but we put it
out front for a few weeks just for fun.

No more yellow glass – Deb made new glass for every window in the building

I have been an engineer and programmer by trade, have some business involvement in the publishing industry, and I also taught martial arts for about forty years, though age and health issues have finally caught up with me and I no longer teach.

That's me again, back in the day

One of the reasons that I enjoy photography is that I have a condition called aphantasia which means that I have essentially no visual memory. If you ask me to imagine what waves rolling in on the ocean looks like in my mind, I can't do it.

Instead, if you ask me to recall something I have seen, I will give you a description in words – that's all that is in my mind. Because of this condition, photography gives me a way to recall and remember that I don't otherwise have. As you might imagine, I take a lot of photographs.

The Atlantic ocean from the coast of Florida

I will post some of my photographic work on Steem as time goes by; I know my way around a camera in the technical sense, but my "artist's eye" isn't well developed, so I actively try to improve my composition and framing skills. If anyone gets any enjoyment out of my photography, I would be most pleased. Because of my memory issue, the fact is that I am sharing my entire visual memory of a moment with you. Photographs are my visual memory.

October 9th, 2012 aurora, shot in northeastern Montana

Directly related to this, in my programming work I have written several photo processing software applications. I often use them to edit and otherwise adjust my photographs. One is called "WinImages", and was developed commercially for Windows some time ago, and which I have now made available for free here; another is DTank (for Developing Tank), a free program for OS X, and is something I am working on right now – it's nowhere near finished, but is far enough along that it can be fun to play with.

My DTank application

My WinImages application

Thanks for reading. I look forward to exploring Steemit.