Welcome, Lodi News-Sentinel readers!

Today is a good day for Ambient Focus. AF has been added to the Lodinews.com list of featured blogs. Hopefully that will bring more traffic here and give LNS readers a little bit of insight to the world of photojournalism.

So, welcome, LNS readers! I hope you enjoy Ambient Focus. I will do my best to regularly give you glimpses into my world and share with you photos and videos you won't see anywhere else.

With that I'd like to add another little update. While I love the current look of AF, it is important that I keep the blog fresh and dynamic. So I will be making some changes to make AF a little more engaging.

These changes may or may not be for the better and they make take a little time to implement them all(blogger is still working on getting the new blog designs fully customizable). The first thing I hope to do is at least get my Ambient Focus camera header back up at the top.

So hang in there if things look a little wonky. If you really don't like the new look, please leave me a comment with some feedback. If things really go off the deep end I will revert back to the more classic look. I've posted a photo below of what the blog typically looks like so you can pick which version you like more when I go through the redesign.

For everyone reading on Lodinews.com, click HERE to visit the full blog and subscribe.

Thanks again, everyone, for visiting Ambient Focus. I look forward to hearing from you all.

-Dan Evans
Chief Photographer, Lodi News-Sentinel

Lodi Grape Fesival

Another year and another Grape Festival has passed. The Grape Festival is one of those events every year that I both look forward to and dread. I look forward to it because there are always good photos to be had. I dread it because it means a lot of work and late nights.

This year, like last year, I went to the festival during its final hours to take some video. Last year I had just purchased my Nikon D3s and the Grape Fest video was one of my first. It was pretty straight forward-clips of rides, people playing games and so on.

The festival obviously had the exact same stuff this year, but I took advantage of my more developed video eye and channeled my inner Sophia Coppola. I'm happy with the results.