WaterShapes World Blog
Given what I do for a living, it's fortunate that I have a deep and abiding love of water. I enjoy being in, on and near it. I even like water in the forms of mist and fog. I must declare, however, that living in the Pacific Northwest for more than three years in the early 1980s put me off a similar love of rain and, more specifically, led me to loathe
It's attention-getting, so it's easy to figure out why it's done. But in this case, my feeling is that just because it can be done doesn't mean it should be done. What I'm agitated about here is the peculiarly popular practice of coloring fountain water to commemorate special dates or events. You know what I mean: Think about all those fountains dyed red for Valentine's
For the past six years - ever since that fateful day in the spring of 2009 when I decided that my offsite storage space was far too inconvenient to be worth the monthly cost - I've been surrounded in my office by floor-to-rafters shelving stacked with back issues of WaterShapes. I love the old magazines, and despite the fact everything we ever printed is now easily available online, I still
Among the many things I like about working on WaterShapes.com and its companion digital newsletter is the opportunity it has given me to write. Back when I was with Pool & Spa News, I wrote opening editorials in just about every issue for nine years. That kept the engine going, but I wouldn't exactly describe the "Reflections" I wrote there as either free-wheeling or exactly
I spend a lot of time looking at watershapes: Big and small, elaborate and simple, recreational and decorative, calm and eruptive, distant and interactive. In too many ways to count, they're so much nicer now than when WaterShapes started paying attention to them 16 years ago. I think back to a time when I was an occasional
It's not the kind of story you want to see in your newspaper or stumble upon while surfing the web: According to researchers at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., the waters of a sampling of well-used swimming pools in Indiana and Georgia were tested and found to contain a whole list of chemicals you might not want to
I've never had much luck when it comes to using this time of year, as so many do, to take stock, review the year just ending or think in any significant way about what's to come with a fresh page on a newly printed calendar. The reasons for this are simple: WaterShapes exists in service to professionals who return the favor by
Back in 2008 and 2009, lots of folks weren't too shy about letting me know I was nuts not to pursue the opportunities embodied in digital media and the Internet. The most persistent voice among those who doubted my sanity was that of Lenny Giteck. I had nominally been his boss at
WaterShapes has been privileged to publish countless beautiful photographs through the years, and many of the best of them ended up on the printed magazine's cover.On a few occasions, however, great images weren't available for cover appearances. There were several possible reasons for this, but most often it had something to do with
Let's stroll back to February 2010: It was about the time we at WaterShapes started getting serious about establishing an Internet presence - and more than a year before we stopped publishing printed editions of the magazine and went all-digital. Back then, we saw the web site as more of a
