About

My day job is researching bicycles at UWM. I went to TU Delft for the 2022-23 academic year to work at the bike lab there. Before that I taught engineering mechanics at UWM and MSOE. Once upon a time, I worked at a software company.

Andrew Dressel

After “retiring” from the software industry out east, I moved to Wisconsin in 2005 in search of a job in the bike industry, either at Harley, Trek, or Hayes, but I ended up at Wheel & Sprocket. The job was great, but after a couple of seasons in retail, I was burned out and returned to grad school to work on my PhD in Bicycle Dynamics at UWM.

Since then, I’ve taught engineering mechanics at UWM and MSOE, hosted an international conference in Milwaukee on Bicycle and Motorcycle dynamics, and started the Bicycle and Motorcycle Engineering Research Lab at UWM.

I started taking pictures of wildlife in Estabrook Park as a sanity project while the UWM campus was closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and have since photographed nearly 400 species of animals, including more than 200 vertebrates, in Estabrook Park.

Since 2021 I’ve been using a Fujifilm X-T4 (upgraded to an X-T5 in 2024 for higher resolution) with a Fujinon XF100-400mm F4.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR lens. It took me a few weeks to get the hang of it, but I’m much happier with the pictures from the second owl encounter, and I still have plenty to learn.

Before that I used a not-very-fancy Fujifilm FinePix HS50EXR 16-megapixel digital camera with a nice 42x (24-1000mm) manually-operated optical zoom, automatic focus, and image stabilization. It worked great for over a year, and I took at least 20,000 pictures on it, but I was a little disappointed in the first owl pictures, so I finally upgraded to

If you’d rather just see all the pictures, please go to my Flickr page or now my Instagram page.

I usually use the excellent allaboutbirds.org website and the Merlin App by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to help me identified what I’ve seen. I even made a donation, so it’s all on the up-and-up. The Google image search has also gotten quite good lately.

For wildflowers, the Wildflowers of Lake Park booklet by Lake Park Friends is an excellent resource.

For all the other stuff, I just ask Dr. Google. The ability to search for similar images is handy sometimes.