iPhone « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

iPhone

iPhone / journalism / photo / Samford / site — Comments Off
23
Oct 12

Pictures, lots of pictures

Did a photojournalism presentation for my class today. I showed the Taylor Morris photo essay I mentioned yesterday. I handed out some notes. I showed off some audio/visual slide presentations, silly stuff really.

I talked about all of these photos for an awfully long time:

Photo samples from Kenny Smith

If you’ve been visiting the site — or lurking in the photo gallery section — over the years you’ve probably seen many of those.

Just remember, some of the shots in that slideshow are meant to be bad. Most of them are average, at best. I told the students today that I had one photojournalism class with a brilliant professor and another photography class with another talented teacher, but I’ve had photos sprinkled in newspapers and magazines and on websites and in books here and there over the years. Not because I’m a great photographer. Click through there, you’ll see.

I’m a serviceable photographer, I told the students. Being there, researching the subject matter, knowing how to tell a story visually, anticipating the action, knowing your equipment, understanding a handful of basic photographic techniques and having extra batteries … that counts.

Link bait from the school blog: What will the iPad mini mean for journalism? I wrote that on my phone. Technology is amazing.

adventures / iPhone / photo / weekend — Comments Off
21
Oct 12

Busiest best Saturday ever

This morning we rode out to Loachapoka, which is a neighboring rural community. Some 185 people live there, but this one Saturday every fall, the place grows by several thousand people. Today was the annual and nationally famous Syrup Sopping. They estimate they draw almost 20,000 people, which is a little hard to believe, but there are tons of people in the little community.

Loachapoka, by the way, gets its name from two Creek words: “locha,” meaning turtle and “polga,” meaning either killing place or gathering place.

But the point is the old-timey agriculture, the arts and crafts on sale, the puppies from the two rescue organizations that show up and the music, played on a gooseneck trailer strategically placed by the railroad tracks. Loachapoka, before the Civil War, was the local hotspot. A depression in the 1870s all but wiped it out, but that railway was critically huge to the community.

Today, it is the syrup. This is a Southern thing, apparently — and just more evidence of something that the rest of you are missing. Buttermilk biscuits with fresh sorghum, juiced and simmered right on the site, is heaven on your fingertips. You could do maple, too, but there is a slight difference. Both are acceptable, however.

And it is dying art. Very labor intensive, as we’ve moved from farms to cities the production has dropped significantly. Wikipedia: Currently, less than 1 million US gallons (3,800 m3) are produced annually in the U.S. Most sorghum grown for syrup production is grown in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

So we bought some local honey and several bottles of syrup. We use it for pancakes, of course, but also salmon and the occasional other treat, like a biscuit. We also bought the kettle corn because there was kettle corn:

Man that’s good stuff, and this is my one day of indulgence of kettle corn for the year.

This evening there was a wedding. My college buddy’s little sister got dressed up and said the things and performed the rituals and found herself married:

I guess I’ve known her since she was 10 or so. It was a lovely ceremony, and the bride was beautiful.

We had a side view of her niece who was the flower girl, and is very much the perfect blonde princess. She dropped petals all the way down the aisle, got to the front of the church and turned over the entire basket. “I did it!”

The reception was at a mansion a few hundred yards from where the bride grew up. We sat out on the back patio enjoying a delicious meal of shrimp and grits and a chicken pasta and just about the most fresh salad you’ve ever tried. We listened to a local band with a wicked bass. They played lots of Motown. I think some of those guys played her brother’s wedding.

Everyone had a great time. The flower girl danced herself silly. I think a U.S. Senator was there. The cake had a raspberry filling, and the groom’s cake was something approaching German chocolate.

I put that picture online after we left the wedding. The bride had already seen it by the time she reached her reception, because that’s the world we live in now.

The mother of the bride was the most beautiful person there. “I think I’ll wear this dress grocery shopping,” she said.

Sweet young lady, good family. It was almost a perfect wedding — she did get married on a Saturday in the fall in the South, after all.

We won’t talk about the day’s football.

collarbone / Friday / iPhone / movies / video — Comments Off
19
Oct 12

Autumn breezes

Not the best day today. Tried to ride my stationary bike a little, but there was nothing gratifying about it. I don’t think that did it, but I felt pretty lousy for the rest of the day thereafter. My shoulder I mean, hurt in ways it hasn’t for a while.

So I guess I’m in the good days and bad days phase? OK, fine. I missed the scar tissue sequence that I was promised was such a joy. My therapy was unexciting, but not horrible as promised. I have more good days than bad. I can deal with all that.

If I just sit very still.

Shot this video late in the afternoon. Didn’t come out quite as I’d hoped. The way the sun was dancing in the leaves was beautiful, and I didn’t quite capture it. But this is still pretty nice:

I dozed off in my chair this evening. I’ll blame the medication. Had dinner and found myself wide awake. Great. Another one of those nights.

So I watched Valkyrie. It wasn’t that great. IMDB notes:

David Bamber (Adolf Hitler) is the only non-German cast member who speaks with a German accent. The filmmakers felt that audiences would be distracted by Hitler speaking in Bamber’s natural British accent.

Because everyone else speaking in their native, non-German accented English was perfectly normal sounding. At least five of the generals, for example, were played by English actors.

I’m on a two-movie streak right now. Previously I watched Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which had both Gary Oldman and Colin Firth and refused to go anywhere. Maybe the point was: The spy game isn’t as exciting as movies suggest. And here’s a guy that’s been killed most brutually.

So I guess the next movie I TiVo should be an obvious winner. Or maybe I should just stick with watching the leaves.

friends / history / iPhone / photo / Samford / Thursday — Comments Off
18
Oct 12

That’s an expensive radio

I had lunch at Alabama Power today with my friend Ike Pigott. He was a local reporter on television for years, moved to the Red Cross and now is in PR and corporate and strategy communication at the power company. Nice guy. Very smart. He’s on our department’s advisory council at Samford. We’re trying to get him more involved.

We ate under the atrium of the Alabama Power headquarters building, seen in the banner on this page, if you’ve ever wondered. Inside they have a barber, a shoe shine repair and leather stretching shop, a post office, a congressional lobby bureau, pneumatic tubes to deliver the staff home at the end of the day and are tinkering with a transporter platform. The place is fancy.

They also have rows of classic radios on display from the Don Kresge Memorial Museum which is housed in the building. Fitting. The first radio station in the state belonged to the power company. They used it to communicate with their outlying folks and to do weather updates and that sort of thing. Eventually they gave the gear to Auburn University, then Alabama Polytechnic Institute, where it took the WAPI calls. Some time later it came back to Birmingham, where WAPI broadcasts today. I used to work on the oldest station in the state. Lots of fun and news and anguish and entertainment went over those airwaves over the years. Most of it during my time there!

But I do go on.

Here are some of the radios they have out for your examination. I skipped most of the oldest models, as Lileks called them the other day, the woody old cathedrals. Why look at those when you can stare at the beauty of the Crosley Bullseye. The 1951 model here came in eight colors. Beautiful bakelight and tubes build. And you thought the 50s were staid:

Here’s the Trav-ler T201, from 1959. How many teenaged girls had this in their room in the early 1960s?

Here is the Westinghouse H124, also called the refrigerator radio. It was in circulation after the war, from 1945 until 1948. It came in four colors, which is probably two more than you could get the fridge in. This radio came with the refrigerator purpose. I wonder if the companion model is available at the refrigerator museum. (There are a few of those, surprisingly.)

The Motorola 53H came in several colors when you ordered it in 1953. Someone in your family had this radio. They were the most boring person in your family. But the rockabilly sounded great:

The Airline 84 BR 1508, just about as beautiful as the genre could get. It has six buttons, so you could set up six pre-set stations across the manual dial. “No more fighting with sis!” the ads might have said. This radio was so important they made postcards about it:

OK, two from the wooden cabinets. Because this one is a globe: The Colonial “New World” picked up only the AM band and had a top vent for the five-tube configuration. This was in catalogs in 1933. Someone listed to Franklin Roosevelt for the first time on this radio:

This Superflex, this very model, was made in Birmingham at Radio Products Corporation in 1927. The engraving on the front panel, which doesn’t really come across in this one shot, is admirable. This Superflex is thought to be the only surviving example.

It was built right here:

Oh, that Crosley Bullseye? The sexy, red picture above? You can buy one of those on ebay for $1,840.

cycling / Friday / iPhone / photo / Samford — 1 Comment
12
Oct 12

I have many ideas about fire, it seems

As I mentioned, this is homecoming at Samford. The festivities start today, and the alumni are returning to campus:

There is a bonfire tonight. And a concert. I talked with some of the students supervising all of that. Apparently the facilities folks take care of building the bonfire and lighting it and there are professionals to tend the blaze and the area is respectfully roped off so no one can do anything silly like falling into it.

I asked how they are going to light the fire, and this might be the part where they could improve the theatricality in the future.

There is a building nearby. Someone could leap off the building, swinging from a rope attached to the adjacent flagpole and drop a torch over the bonfire fuel, just like a rope swing over a lake.

No.

Whomever throws the javelin on the track and field team could throw one into the stack of wood.

No.

They could make a play on words about the opposing mascot and have a great visual joke with that.

No.

The head coach could light the thing.

No.

They could do the archer thing, like in the Barcelona Olympics.

No.

The star running back could somehow carry through an incendiary — of course you’d want him to be able to safely escape the thing.

No.

Someone from the Air Force ROTC could fly —

No.

We could launch something from the president’s home, which sits adjacent the campus on the mountain.

No.

Well, they didn’t say no to all of the ideas. They said they’d “take some under advisement” so I wouldn’t be surprised if one of those happened next year.

Maybe a zip line from the president’s home.

(They have fire hoses and all the various safety equipment you could think of on standby just feet from the bonfire site. They think of everything. Except zip lines.)

As part of homecoming my department holds their autumn advisory council meeting. These are alumni and other local industry leaders who we interact with to make sure we’re headed in the right direction, get ideas from them, see if they can help us find extra money and so on.

I prepare a bunch of documents that we give them. Our students’ successes, our department’s growth, our challenges and what the faculty are doing. An abbreviated list of things I’ve done appeared in that document. Pretty good year:

We had dinner tonight with a friend. He’d helped us bring the new washing machine home earlier this week, saving about 80 bucks. (Shipping is expensive, even if the store is three miles away.) He’d told us about a place he’d taken a date. Cajun.

Naturally I wanted to go. He agreed it was good enough to have again. So off we went to Jimmy’s, a restaurant I hadn’t heard of in a place I wouldn’t have thought to look.

Apparently they ship in the bread daily from New Orleans, which is ridiculous. Also the seafood comes in every morning, and the shrimp I had agreed. Just wish they’d given me more.

That could have been the 16 miles and the fit test I did this morning. Apparently the bike I was riding can measure this, so I did a V02 Max test and it fell within the excellent range, as described by The Cooper Institute for Aerobics Research.

Thing of it was, I don’t think it was the workout that limited me, but the circumstances. I did that on no calories and with no water. Next time, I’ll bet my number will be higher.