We went out for the now-traditional birthday dinner at Shogun for Gina’s birthday. This year we had a big crowd attending. I realize Gina’s not in the picture, but this was a funny moment and it gave me a chance to make one of those new-fangled animated GIFs that all the kids are talking about.
When the school year started, Abby began learning about letters. They did B’s last week. They did A the week before. Now when we’re driving around or grocery shopping or whatever, Abby points out all the A’s and B’s she finds. I think it’s cute.
Kickin’ it poolside.
In the past I’ve been labeled a swimming poolophobe based mainly on my yearly pronouncements that swimming pools are really just big tanks of p*ss. I have a whole comedy routine about how everyone pees in the pool and those who say they don’t are liars. When our neighborhood pool closed in Johnson last summer due to high levels of pee byproducts, I was completely vindicated.
Despite all that, I really enjoy swimming. I do prefer to swim in a lake, river or the ocean. I realize natural water bodies are arguably just as contaminated as your average pool. Certainly some bodies of water are clearly unfit to swim in.
Abby loves her rain gear. She’s got two raincoats and two pairs of boots. I’d been telling her that the next time it rains I’d take her out and let her run through puddles with her boots on. The next time it rained was Thursday morning, so we set out to find some good puddles.
We found this one at Murray Park just as another storm was blowing in. She began jumping up and down in the water while I was getting my picture takin’ crap set up. I got everything ready and the exposure set and told her jump and splash, but she said, “I don’t want to.” I asked why and she said her dress was wet and she got some mud on her knee. She said she wanted to find a cleaner puddle before she did any more splashing.
I shot this with my silver umbrella and SB600, but I don’t remember the settings. I do know I underexposed the ambient to get the weird background to go a little dark. Then I added a vignette in Photoshop.
I thought when I widened the content area of the blog it would allow me present these vertical images better, but it turns out it makes it harder. These blog templates weren’t set up to make it easy to create nice designs. I don’t know enough about CSS and all that other crap to make it look like I want it to. The wider area is nice for the horizontal shots though.
OK, I changed up the old Post Irony a bit. Well, actually, all I did was make it wider. It’ll display the horizontal photos larger, and hopefully it’ll give me some options in displaying the vertical photos. I shoot a lot of verticals and they always look weird on the blog to me. We’ll see how it goes.
Unfortunately, the changes don’t apply retroactively to all the other posts. I’d have to go back and upload the photos all over again to make them fit the wider format. It bugs the crap out of me.
The leaden sky was spitting snow, I had hiked a mile or so over snot-slick moss, rocks and logs, my coccyx was sore, and I was ledged out well short of my destination.
Back in the summer I had read in Tim Ernst’s blog about the slot canyon on Shop Creek upstream of the famous Twin Falls in the Buffalo National River area, and I put it in my mental file of places to go. I spent the day Saturday cleaning up ice storm damage at our summer home near Fayetteville and planned to get up early Sunday and do some waterfall hunting before heading back to Little Rock. Ernst hadn’t given the location of the slot canyon on his Web site but a little Internet sleuthing turned up this blog, which described how to get there. Thanks, Derek. It turns out you just go to Twin Falls, which is easy to get to, and then continue upstream. Derek has some good photos of the slot canyon and Tim Ernst has his usual stellar photos of the place. Both Tim and Derek wrote about the difficulty of accessing the canyon. Both of them even recommended rock climbing gear, and, in fact, Ernst wrote about using a harness to hang out over the creek to get his pictures. But I figured I could get in there a little ways at least. I was wrong.
The annual Mule Jump in Pea Ridge is truly something everyone should see once. Once will do it. Mule jumps draw the kinds of crowds you’d expect. Very few of your urbane types, unless they came up from Fayetteville to see how they live in the provinces.
Abby enjoyed the mules, the funnel cake and the clapping from the crowd.
A couple of dcoumentary film makers saw the above photo on Flickr and contacted me about buying it to put on a DVD cover of a film about the Buffalo River. I quoted them a price and they took it. Isn’t that weird?
That’s my dad standing on Hawksbill Crag in the Upper Buffalo Wilderness.
Sometimes as a reporter you have to go places and see things you would rather skip. I covered an exhumation last week for the newspaper. Can you spot me in this photo, which ran in the paper with my story? It’s the only time I can remember that I was in a picture that made it to print. I usually try to watch the photographer and stay out of any shots. I failed to do that this time. Zac Lehr shot the photo and The Morning News owns the copyright to the image.
Witnessing an exhumation is about as bad as you’d imagine. In this case, they removed the body from the casket at the cemetery to put it in the medical examiner’s vehicle. If you want to see more photos of the exhumation go to the photographers’ blog on the paper’s Web site. You’ll have to scroll down a few entries. (There aren’t any shots of the body.)