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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.

photo / Samford / weekend — Comments Off
14
Oct 12

Catching up

The regular Sunday post where extra pictures are added to the site to give a free day’s worth of content.

This is Hodges Chapel on the Samford University campus. This was homecoming weekend, but it always looks this beautiful.

Across the way, and later in the day, they are preparing for a pep rally and bonfire before the Saturday game:

They have fire hoses and everything.

There was also a concert Friday night. Music was played. The band was not set on fire. Many people had a great time.

Downtown Opelika, Ala., where the sidewalks are rolled up at 7:45, no matter the day of the week. The cajun place we ate at on Friday night is just to the left of this shot:

Saw this in the restroom of the place we ate last night. Seemed somehow out of place:

Tom Berenger and Corbin Bernsen can’t work out their differences in Major League. Charter Cable, who is terrible, can’t work out their problems, either. Charter is terrible.

Auburn / football / friends / memories / photo / site / Twitter / weekend — Comments Off
13
Oct 12

Auburn is unfortunately bad at football

As in, unfortunately bad. And they are not just bad, but also unfortunately bad. This morning was the fourth 11 a.m. kickoff of the year, which is a good measuring stick for your team’s play.

We watched the game on television, because it was in Oxford. I tweeted things, as many of us do these days. In my mind, this is all about the coaching. The players are giving it their all, but they aren’t being put in, or finding a lot of places to be successful right now. Tough to watch, but worse for them, I’m sure.

Two of the things I wrote:

“Third and 13, stay on this side of the orange sticks, y’all.” That’s good coordinating.

You can’t figure out what Scot Loeffler is doing? Don’t worry. The players don’t understand it either. I blame the coordinator.

I feel for the seniors who are on that side of the ball. They deserve better than this. They all do, really. The coordinator, Loeffler, is in over his head. Gene Chizik apologized to fans last week. Who knows what he’ll say about a 41-20 loss to Ole Miss which allowed the Rebels to break a 16-game conference losing streak.

Auburn, meanwhile, is 4-8 in the SEC since the national championship. They’ve lost six in a row to conference opponents — four of them highly ranked — by a combined score of 192-68. So it hasn’t even been particularly close.

If you look at a head-to-head comparison of the three worst seasons of Auburn football this century, the data points aren’t close there either. This, from Justin Lee, says it all.

You decide:

or:

For something more fun than this, I’ve gotten caught up on the photo galleries. I had to catch up from almost the exact moment I ruined summer. Anyway. Here’s July. There’s August. And here’s September.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a dinner date. The Smiths are joining the Willis (Willisi?) this evening.

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.

iPhone / journalism / photo / Samford / Thursday / video — Comments Off
11
Oct 12

I mentioned three desserts below

Happy 10/11/12 day. Do you know where you were at 7:08:09? How about 1314:15?

This is Homecoming Weekend at Samford. Because of this and the fall break landing in the same week the student-journalists at The Crimson are publishing a paper tomorrow. So they’re putting it to bed tonight.

See? Here’s proof.

So I watched them put a bit of that together. I saw the lady that works at the local deli. She hadn’t been there the last two times I’d visited.

I thought you’d moved on, I said.

“No, I’ll never get away. Unless it is to start my own place, Liz’s. We’d have banana pudding and red velvet cake. That’s what the people here always make me bring to the potlucks.”

I promised I’d show up twice a week if she did that.

Watched part of the vice-presidential debate, but on mute because, as the rest of the world just learned, Vice President Biden says a lot more with his body than his mouth.

Had a very nice talk with the editor of the paper. She is a smart, driven young woman. Quiet at first, but vividly funny. She aspires to be a photographer, and is very talented. She’s worked for me for three years now, and our department is fortunate to have her.

We have a lot of students like that. Seems like we’re always saying that of someone. “We’re fortunate to have a lady like that in the program” or “We’re going to flunk him so he has to stay another year.”

She runs the paper much like an executive, setting the course and letting the staff do their work. And they’ve come along nicely in a short time. So now I’m going to challenge them to work even harder, make something even better. They are conscientious and diligent and I believe they will soon be making something they are really proud of.

Tonight she asked me what I thought they could do. Now she has a list. And probably regrets asking that question.

But we also discuss things like coning.

People have too much pocket change, apparently.