photo « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

photo

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.

photo / weekend — Comments Off
21
Oct 12

Catching up

Where extra pictures land, having been lovingly saved to have something for Sundays.

The leaves are beginning to turn. These are on the Samford University campus. I can see these trees from my office window. Beautiful campus:

Happy little clouds over downtown Birmingham:

The sun is starting to fall over Samford.

Saw this guy on The Yankee’s car one night this week. This shot was from my phone:

This one was from my DSLR. It shows better texture on his skin, I think.

The last rose of the fall? The next morning all of the petals were on the ground:

After dinner I checked on the frog. He’d moved from the front passenger tire to the roof of the car. Also, he may be stoned:

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.

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.

photo / Samford / site / Wednesday — Comments Off
17
Oct 12

“Would you mind if I take your picture?”

Woke up early. Went to sleep late. That probably explains the dozing off I did this evening.

But I had a nice workout this morning, moved some weight around, turned muscles this way and that. Rode the stationery bike for an hour or so to get a good sweat. I’m ready to ride my bike on roads again. I’m still trying to wait out my shoulder, though. This, he said for the 13th week in a row, is getting old.

Had a meeting with the boss. Did some work on our scholarship program. Had lunch. Critiqued two newspapers and challenged the editorial staff to make their work even bigger and better. Gave an interview to a freshman.

Ran around campus and took pictures. I wanted to take some shots to demonstrate what not to do. This is surprisingly easy for photographers like me. So here are a few of those. But look! The back of her head is in focus!

Ms. Debbie keeps our department running smoothly. She’s such a sweet lady. And now she’s pretending to do work with some of our students. The young lady you can’t say was a section editor at the Crimson last year. Her friend there is a student and a model. You should see the shots where he is mugging for the camera.

Too wide. Far too wide. No information, but it has some motion into the background!

Frisbee is a big part of the quad culture, so show it differently, I’ll say. I asked this guy and his friend if I could take a few shots. “We’re not very good,” they said. “Fine, I’ll just crouch in between you. Buzz me.”

You have to suffer for your art. Also, fill the frame. Motion, action, showing the face. No rule of thirds, though:

I can’t count all the things I did wrong with this picture. Now I have to point them out to my students:

Dogs! On campus! This can be exciting and cute. But not if you compose the shot like this:

Unusual and creative and illustrative compositions make for better photography. Dogs learn the world through their noses, so this one is slightly better:

I took that picture five years ago, in a different state. Looks like the same pooch, though.

So I walked all over campus looking for things to do right and wrong to show in class next week. Now I’m type the rest of the night away. Some kind of life I’m lucky to live.