Howdy, my name is Michael (or Mike, I don’t care) Halberstadt. I’m a proud dad to a soon-to-graduate UC Davis student, Ella Halberstadt (a.k.a Babyshtat).
Perhaps more relevant is that I’m a third generation photographer. My grandfather Milton (“Hal”) Halberstadt was a student at the “Bauhaus West” and went on to become an influential commercial studio photographer in San Francisco.
My dad Hans Halberstadt has written and illustrated over 60 books and still runs a small niche stock photo agency to which I also contribute.
More distant relatives that were known for their photography included Ernst “Ernie” Halberstadt, and Max Halberstadt.
So I guess what I’m trying to say is…. photography, like diarrhea, runs in my jeans. And what I’m trying to say with that is I also like to tell bad dad jokes. So be forewarned.
Land Acknowledgement
LensBusters.com acknowledges that we occupy the unceded Ancestral ether of the UseNet, who are the original inhabitants of the internet. Herewith we also acknowledge others that previously occupied this space, including Broadcast Television, Cable Television, printed paper magazines, printed manuals, the USPS, terrestrial radio, photographic meetups, swap meets, camera clubs, museums, galleries, weirdos who’d chat about photography in cafes and all of the predecessors of LensBusters.com’s giant Internet footprint.
Before HTML, the colorful canvases of CSS, and the interactive magic of JavaScript, there was a digital landscape, raw and uncharted. It was a time of bulletin boards and dial-up modems, where text-based adventures unfolded, and communities forged connections through the shared language of ASCII.
We acknowledge this ancestral internet, a frontier of early explorers, where pioneers laid the foundation for the web we know today. We pay respects to the protocols of the past, the gopher tunnels, the FTP archives, and the echoing voices of Usenet. We recognize their enduring influence on the digital world and celebrate their contribution to the evolution of online communication.
Just as we acknowledge the traditional lands of Indigenous peoples, we honor the digital territories that paved the way for our modern internet. We recognize the ingenuity of those who came before us, who, with limited tools and boundless imagination, built the first virtual communities and laid the groundwork for the interconnected world we inhabit today.
In this spirit, we invite you to explore our website, built upon the legacy of those early digital pioneers. May we continue to innovate and connect, while always remembering the roots from which our digital world has grown.