Hello

About

I'm Brendon Degner. I live in Colorado with my family, I run a small business, and most of my spare time goes to a camera or to building things with AI. This site is where I put the pictures and write down what I learn.

Photography

I've been taking pictures since a Kodak point and shoot in 2000. My first real camera was a Nikon D3100 in 2011. After that came a D750, a Fujifilm X-T4, and since late 2024, a Sony a7R V. My Lightroom catalog is past 59,000 frames now, and the most used lens in it is still the 50mm f/1.4 from my Nikon years.

These days I mostly shoot travel and landscape. Hawaii is our favorite trip, and we've been about ten times. Closer to home, I've been finishing a sunrise panorama of Mount Sneffels from the Dallas Divide as a 60 inch wall print. Most recently it was Delos and Mykonos, which I wrote up in Six frames from one day on Mykonos. I also shoot my kids' swim meets, dance and soccer, which is why a 70-200 lives in the bag.

Every edit starts in Lightroom Classic and the serious ones finish in Photoshop. The two landscape photographers I study most are Peter Lik and Elia Locardi. I proof prints at home on a Canon PIXMA PRO-100 and send the big ones to Bay Photo. The Gallery has the finished work, and Uses lists the gear.

Building with AI

I run most of my work, and a good part of home life, through a fleet of AI bots. One rule covers all of them: they draft, and I press send. I wrote up how that works in How I run a small business with a fleet of AI bots.

This site is one of their projects. I talked through the blueprint with Grok voice while driving to pick up my daughter from dance, and a pull request was waiting when I got home.

At home

Our house is my test bench. Home Assistant runs on a Synology NAS and drives a calendar dashboard in our kitchen, and a printer at home spits out a one page brief every weekday morning. When I'm not at a keyboard, I'm usually at the Weber Smokey Mountain, working out how long ribs and pork shoulder really take at 5,400 feet.

Say hello

Email me at [email protected]. I'm also on Instagram, X, LinkedIn and Facebook.