Portable strobe unit, meet sewage creek. Sewage creek, this is flash.

I dropped my strobe into a creek while doing this project.

I went to bed with wet socks, completely pissed off.

So, these pictures aren't good and I'm fine with that.

Another chance for Michael Vick's Dogs

This is my audio slideshow pick for class, compliments of The New York Times.

You gotz to copy and paste, sorry friends.

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/sports/20080202_VICK_FEATURE/index.html?#section1



And if you liked that one, or it was a bit too much of a downer, this other one will lift your spirits.


http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/play/audiogallery/soundseen.shtml

Multiple Flash

The Lakota coffee-house is a daily refuge for many Columbia locals. Brent and Sarah are two of its employees dedicated to the task of energizing customers efficiently and with a warm smile. "Diet root beer and a glass of ice, right?" Sarah says this to one man before he's even reached the counter. "I know pretty much everyone's order," Sarah says, a talent that every good coffee-shop employee should have.

Move, Osaka, Move

This is my blending select. It looks way fucked-up weird on this blog.

Jimmy Lien fillets the fish as a prep-cook at Osaka at eleven a.m. as well as rolls fresh sushi for the day's fare.

I loved taking these pictures and although Jimmy tells me that he's "not photogenic" and is just going to "fillet some fish now," he ends up being the subject of my select (as well as the adorable chef in the background who peeks at me for a long while through the tiny kitchen window as I snap away.

"It's fine," I tell Jimmy, "Just do what you do and don't mind me. "

Hookers and Pies

Sean Jarvis and Amanda Wilson lounge at Shelter Gardens in Columbia, Mo.

Their conversation is dominated by Gay politics, but Amanda also discusses her idea for an erotic restaurant called, " Hookers and Pies" and you don't even want to know where the waitresses put the pies before serving them.

I quit smoking today

Yeah, April Fool's.

-sigh-

Orange Gel, Tungsten's hell

Yeah, I can't seem to stop with the truly sad cheesy titles.

I need to curb my blog, for real.


Anyhow, my select is from my tungsten take, the wedding shower for Lydia Carey, whom is marrying Travis Coulliette.

They asked me to be their wedding photographer after they saw the pictures I took for the assignment, which I found really flattering and considered it an honor to accept their request, but really I'm just scared shitless about ruining someone's special day.



Travis Coulliette joins his fiancée, Lydia Carey, at her wedding shower after Lydia has finished opening her gifts and playing games with the other ladies in attendance. “I’m so pissed at you, I heard that you got the question wrong about why I wanted to marry you,” Travis says, “She told them that she had no idea why I wanted to marry her, NO IDEA.”
When asked what the real reason is, Travis responds matter-of-factly, “Because I wanted to spend the rest of my life with the woman of my dreams, that’s why.”

Direct your flash-ttention to the front of the screen

What a terrible pun.

I didn't think we would be needing a lighting diagram for this assignment, so I will just say that I bounced my flash off ceilings, windows, myself, and walls.

During direct flash, I directly flashed.

My selects were from the direct flash portion.

They're of John Burr, a Columbia resident and employee of Storage-mart.
He makes bon-fires on the Missouri river.
It was SO much fun to watch, especially when the ladies with him named Erica and Jessica, made bombs out of tin foil, toilet bowl cleaner, and two liter bottles.

The cleaner would create a chemical reaction within the bottle that would turn the tin foil into gas and then expand the bottle until it exploded.
The sound was so loud that it reverberated off of the mountains and hills surrounding the river and echoed back like thunder.

Check out the photos, I'll add one of the bomb so that you guys can see that also.

Shot one: Let the conflagration begin



Shot two: John Burr reveals himself




Okay, I tried adding a shot of "da bomb," but that's definitely not working right now.
Good times.

YEEHAW FOR SPRING.
over and out

Metal for your mouth

This is my metal picture, a S'mores marshmallow roaster.
Three hours went into this shot and another three into Kyle's glass photo.

GOOD TIMES.

Check out the lighting diagram, kiddies:

Classmate Interview

This is my classmate interview, done again with Cat Szalkowski.

I was restricted from using little of the twenty minutes of footage that I have of Miss Cat, due to less than perfect framing.

Yeehaw.

Classmate Portrait

Portrait of Cat Szalkowski


Cat is an inherent extremist (like me!)

I asked her to bring her scarf to our first shooting because I thought that it would a) offer her a comfort zone and b) would serve to communicate the occasionally shyer side of her personality.

Lighting Diagram for single-light portraits
(Like the above portrait)



Lighting Diagram for multi-light portraits

Happy Valentine's Day/Single Awareness Day

I thought I would celebrate the holiday by posting a picture that I took on Valentine's day (three years ago, now) when I was on my way to Fundamentals with David Rees.



Man, those kids are adorable.

Chump be stumped

This is my stump the chump.

It's from a way old (1968) National Geographic and it's a Kodachrome taken by National Geographic photographer, James P. Blair, of"The fools," a pantomime produced by Fialka.

Fialka's troupe has won acclaim from New York to Moscow.

I still despise the term, "Blog."

I can't stand that horrible, gelatinous sounding word.

Maybe it's because I've been "blogging" long before people decided to start to call it such.

I have an online journal (that I still update to this day) that I started in October 2000.

And, oh man, the days before html invaded were sweet.

When html came to TeenOpenDiary, a site that operated before livejournal, deadjournal, xanga, facebook, and the term "BLOG" (ugh) it became an intense social universe infested with "diary style professionals" that would create 'totally awesome' schemes for your online diary.

I stopped reading random entries off of the main page because I couldn't take being blinded with sparkles and little figures of customizable graphic chicas with 'cute l'il shorts and like, 'a dog that looks just like my l'il puppy, Princess.'

Along with html-encoding came the hackers.

There was once a TOD Apocalypse perpetrated by a sort of band of TOD terrorists.

(If you haven't caught on already, TOD stands for Teenopendiary)

These terrorists planned an apocalypse in the form of a virus that would delete all of your account's information if you signed into the site during the "hours of destruction."

I was a well-known diarist on the site in those days and had uncovered the plan through other, un-affiliated hackers.

These other hackers included one who communicated to me that he (allegedly) had invented the virus (or the process for manually hacking the system) and that the aggressors had learned it from him by saying that they would 'never use it.'

This "master" hacker, upon finding out that others were preparing to mis-use the information that he had leaked, created a system for site users to download their journals onto their computer hard-drives in the case that their diary was deleted during the attack. 

(That option that was either defective or non-existent on TOD at that point)

I alerted diarists as well and winced that entire day and night.

I stared at my computer knowing that there were so many innocent writers losing their every chronicled word, some their years of mental processes and poetry, some their glittery homepages, and for others, their desire to ever writer again.

I survived, bitterly, and eventually came to embrace the html medium of online chronicling.

The first picture that I uploaded onto TOD was one of my guinea pig that I'd taken with my dad's spiffy web-cam (got to love bachelor dads) of my darling guinea pig named Bugs.

But I never forgot the event nor the people who embraced it.

One aggressor of the event, who went by the name of a.n.t.i.f.r.e.ak., would post insults to "superficial sub-genre" diarists, with usernames like, ~*Preppy Lady*~, i/beat/up/preps/, ^Goth~Kittie^, XXXPuNkYMuNkYXXX, or, 

OH, there was a fake celebrity sub-genre too!

Yeah, that was weird--

There were all of these people that would pretend they were celebrities and post fake fan fiction about how they were 'so pissed at Justin Timberlake and were DEF. gunna break up with him.'

And the "celebs," as they called themselves, would "meet-up" at a specific post, at a set time at one of their diaries, and have A PARTY there.

One had to keep refreshing the page to follow the conversation of comments on the post, like a sadsad delusional stone-age chat room.

And "Aguilerababy and BRITTY SPEARS, and *(jEwEl)* and TheREALbritney" would discuss the other parties they've been to and who they were mad at and who was a fake and who they had a crush on.

It was an enlightening phenomenon, but as all good (read: terrible) things tend to do, faded away in the "blog" pre-history.

More online diary sites moved onto the scene, including opendiary

(the, "graduation," I suppose, from teenopendiary),
livejournal, the obligatory deadjournal, xanga, etc

So here's to the "blog," which is only exciting now because you can say it in serious professional conversation and then continue to be taken seriously.

This agency contributes this entry as a toast to the "Blog-o-sphere,"

and includes a link to her original archive:

(Half Girl)