I love Peanuts comics. They’ve been a staple of my geeky life since I was a wee wolf. Even now, part of my morning ritual is to read the daily strip at Snoopy.com before I dive into my Secret Squirrel government work.

This ritual has been a bit derailed for the past few months (actually, it seems like it’s been this way since well before last Christmas). Snoopy.com is closed for upgrades, and so all traffic has been redirected to the Peanuts page of Comics.com. I suppose that’s acceptable, since it allows me to continue to get my daily dose of Chuck & Co. But I miss the official site.

So I thought I’d be sneaky and try other URLs related to Snoopy.com, just to see if maybe there was a way to see what’s going on behind the curtain (hey, it’s worked on other sites; why wouldn’t it work here?). I started with www.snoopy.net. What I got, instead of a sneak peek at the new Peanuts site, was an eyeful of happy.

Seems that a photographer in Ohio has purchased this URL and set it to redirect visitors to his own site, imagesafari. From what I’ve gathered, the photographer in question is Jon Anhold, and he’s been posting online since 2003. In fact, it looks like he started posting 10 days before incite.thought went live. Kismet? I think so.

I know very little about the mechanics of professional photography, but I do recognize what is aesthetically pleasing to my amateur eye. From that perspective, I think Jon’s photos are gorgeous. They’re wonderful compositions with rich, deep colors, beautiful use of natural and artificial lighting, and an ever-present sense of whimsy. The photo I use here is from his site. By no means is this ducky the best of what I saw, but it’s rubber ducky, dammit! He’s so fun…he makes bath time lots of fun…you know the rest, right?

Anyway. He also focuses on subjects that remind me very much of the kind of photos my dad loves to take: landscapes, flora, fauna, machinery, airplanes, cars. There’s a definite sense of comforting familiarity when I look at the pictures at imagesafari. So if you have some free time, I encourage you to go to imagesafari and see for yourself the eyeful of happy that greeted me during my failed attempt at Snoopy.com sneak-a-peekery.