The friends of FotoGrande.com reflect personal connections with colleagues and siblings.

Sandoval Signpost:  The monthly newspaper based in Placitas, N.M., covering the town of Bernalillo and people, issues and events around Sandoval County.  William Diven is the paper’s news editor.

OutdoorsNewMexico.com:  Crime reporter and fly fisherman Karl Moffatt wanders northern New Mexico stalking the wily trout and the people working to keep the state a recreation paradise.

BobDiven.com:  Artist Bob Diven, based in Las Cruces, N.M., paints, composes, sings, acts and travels the country for one-man shows, art installations and set building when he’s not tweaking local noses with his editorial cartooning or performing weddings as a Humanist Celebrant.

ClosingTheChasm.com:  Benjamin Diven M.D. authored “Closing the Chasm” as a series of letters to one of his sons diving into the issues leading up to Benj’s diagnosis with bipolar disorder and what it’s like to live with the effects and limitations of its treatment.

JackDivenPhotography.com:  Jack Diven is a portrait, wedding and commercial photographer who has been working out of Las Cruces, N.M., since the early 1970s.  Along the way he’s gotten really good at the 1940s Hollywood-style lighting that made glamour shots of movie stars shine.

JoeMonahansNewMexico:  Blogger Joe Monahan isn’t a relative or even a close friend, but he works hard to shine light on the inner workings of la política in New Mexico.  Politics wasn’t invented here, just taken to new levels over the last few centuries of infighting, horse trading and back-room treacheries.

Larry O’Hanlon:  Neighbor Larry O’Hanlon, a fellow freelancer here in the northern foothills of the Sandia Mountains, is a veteran science writer who recently took a break from Placitas to be the communications officer at the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.  His current gigs include managing the blog network for the American Geophysical Union.

Joan Hellquist’s Spirit Drum Designs studio is just across the road. There she combines her art training, love of wildlife and wilderness and a near-life-long practice of drumming into a single artistic form. Her hand-painted drums carry wild images from birds to buffalo. She still dabbles in pastel landscapes, too.