The gallery image counter hit eleven million views on January 6, 2010!  We hit ten million on October 25, 2009.  It would have been nice to hit eleven million before the end of 2009, but this is still close enough!  The eleven million number, however, only represents the number of beard views since the counter started from zero on January 26, 2006.

This time, I wasn’t at the keyboard to see which photo was number eleven million.  In consolation, I’m illustrating this post with a previously-unpublished photo of Christopher.

Great beards should be photographed.

The documentary beard project formally has a home on beards.org now.  The first photo album is that of Brian, starting out with twelve photos.  There will be much more to come — in Brian’s album and others.  Click on the image above to go there.

A friendly gentleman with an amazing beard used to run the Hess gas station in front of Manassas Mall in Virginia.  He kept the massive full beard pretty much all of the time, but occasionally would shave it off and commence re-growing it again right away.  One time when he was in the early stages of growing the beard again, I looked at his beard in awe and thought to myself that the beard growth was so dense and abundant, that it appeared to gush out from his face.  He was a beard gusher — an extraordinary sight, indeed!

I would guess that he has long-since retired by now.  I haven’t been to Virginia in many years.  Still, I’ll never forget the sight of that powerful beard.  Beards like his are rarely seen.  This makes an excellent case for documentary beard photography.  Great beards should be photographed!

After a much-too-long hiatus, the beards.org documentary beard photography project resumed activity yesterday with another original beard photo shoot.  Dale, with his amazing beard growth, kindly agreed to the beard photo shoot.  Here are some preview shots from March 20th, 2009.

This is just a quick note to let you know a little about what’s going on with the site lately.  A series of difficult circumstances arose in the second half of July and still continue today.  This has pretty much put the brakes on site development.  New features were put on hold and the daily updates to the beards of the world gallery have been held up.  Around mid-August, I had only a brief opportunity to resume work on the site.  I am hoping now that the work on the site will slowly be coming back up to speed.  Thanks for your patience.

And here is another preview photo of Brian:

This is another example of original beard photography from beards.org.  There is much more to come.

You’ll be seeing a lot more of him here soon!