Monthly Archives: September 2013

Wheee! Good morning!

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turtle_27917I spotted this little guy in the road near Hay Creek as I barreled toward him in my dually crew-cab work truck.  I turned round down the street a ways to see if I actually saw what I thought I saw, then doubled back to find him.  My coworker riding in the truck didn’t see anything, but I was positive and had to prove it to myself.  I pulled off to a side street, waited for traffic to pass, and bolted over to a tiny little spot in the road.

 

turtle_iphone_1079When I say tiny, I wasn’t kidding.  This little guy, yet to be named by my little boys, is pretty small.  As a photography enthusiast I like to think I can pick out details in the world around me, but to spot a quarter-sized lump walking across the road has got to be a new personal best.

I may take another few photos of this little guy and perhaps even let the fellas issue him a name, but then he’s going back to the Hay Creek area to be set free.  I’m no expert in the care of snapping turtles, and he can only get more hazardous to curious little-boy fingers as he grows.  It sure was neat to meet him, though!  Isn’t he cute?

 

UPDATE:  Snappy the turtle has been returned to Hay Creek from which he came:

turtle_return_27956My little guy and I waited for the rain to pass and made a dusk voyage out to the east end of town and let the little turtle go.  One could call him Lucky considering that he would likely have been pasted had he remained on East Rosser.  In any case, he’s got a shot at survival now.  He wouldn’t have made a good pet and I try to teach my boys to be responsible with nature, so it was a teachable moment.  After all, Proverbs 12:10 says, “A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast…”

A trip down broadcasting’s Memory Lane: Faces of Country Morning

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I hope you all are aware of this, but just in case you aren’t – Phil Parker and Mark Armstrong are back on the air on KFYR-AM 550 with their “P.M.S. in the Morning” show. It’s fun, it’s local, it’s clean, and for me it brings back very fond memories.

I put in around 14 years at KFYR-TV, and during a part of that we used to simulcast the Country Morning program from 6 to 6:30 every weekday morning. Al Gustin would go down the hall to the AM radio studio, where we had a couple of cameras, and the guys would bring their combination of local news and weather as well as a dose of frivolity for the last segment of the half-hour. It was a blast and a privilege.

One of Phil & Mark’s trademark contributions to the show was an intentionally low-budget “camcorder” segment where they’d take a VHS camcorder with them on visits to small town activities and then show portions of the resulting footage on the air. This was an homage to that shooting style. One morning I decided to grab my old VHS camcorder (this was twenty years ago, after all) and do a little “behind the scenes” segment for the program. I’d all but forgotten about it, but I came across it this week while I was going through some old tapes and thought I’d share:

Al has since retired from broadcasting, Phil and Mark are back on the air, I haven’t spoken to Crystal in a few months, Mike passed away several years ago, and Reed and I are out saving the world one day at a time. Even during my tenure at KFYR-TV I moved on from overnights and mornings, working primarily on video production work and the afternoon and evening newscasts. I’m glad I got to work on Country Morning when I did. Currently you can catch the same ol’ familiar spirit in the revived Phil & Mark Show, PMS in the Morning, even if only on the radio side of things. Be sure to give it a listen.

A little research pays off

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Good photography can be by accident, but most often it’s not.  In the case of this weekend’s photo adventure, I actually did a pretty good deal of scouting.  I knew that I wanted to try for a sunset photo, but that foreground was very important.  I’d selected in my head a set of old bridge pilings that have been very good to me in the past.  What I needed was to scope ’em out a little bit.

pilings_clouds_27590This is what I came up with in the morning.  I was so pleased with the high, wispy clouds that I actually took some time to start framing and snapping instead of just scouting.  I also took a little bit of time to check out the angles and see if it would work right:

sun_surveyorThis is the Sun Surveyor App, available on iTunes.  It allows you to hold your iPhone in position where your camera would be, orient accordingly, and see where the sun will be at various hours of the day.  You can even scrub back and forth to see it move and track its path across the sky.  We used this on a couple of locations for the Tigirlily “North Dakota” music video recently.  It’s very handy.

sunset_pilings_27870Then came the sunset.  Sadly, as this location was well out of town, I missed the light I was hoping for by a mere five minutes or so.  Despite that setback I was determined to come away with a shot I liked.  As it turned out, having the sun absent made it a little easier to expose details in the shadows as well as the sky, and the clouds suddenly aligned in a symmetry that played very nicely off the reflective surface of the pond.  I found myself okay with the fact that I’d missed the sun.

I would still like a crack at this with the golden orb on the horizon and clouds lit accordingly, but the fact of the matter is that I may never see such perfect clouds at this location again.  I put in the preparation, I got a cool shot, and that may just have to be enough.  If I hadn’t come back out here in the morning to scout things I may not have been ready to get the shot I did before the clouds moved on and the sky got too dark. Therefore I’m certain that the preparation paid off.

B-17, take two: new angles

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I posted earlier about the visit by Sentimental Journey, one of the few airworthy B-17 bombers that remain.  I didn’t do the $5 walkthrough again this year, although it was definitely worth the money.  I did, however, do a couple of cool things.


One of the things was to shoot some video of them firing up the engines. Because engines like this are prone to leaking certain fluids, someone stands by with a fire extinguisher and gives a thumbs-up to the pilot once each engine has safely spun up. They start with engine #3 because it’s near the battery and gets the best crank, and work their way around the aircraft from there. My little boy thought it was pretty cool.

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The other cool thing was to park out on the northwest end of the runway and let the rumbling beast roar right over our heads. My little guys thought this was a really sweet deal.

Scroll down a little bit if you want to see my interior shots of this piece of military aviation history. Check out the video above if you haven’t already. If you missed this aircraft, hope it comes by again in a few more years. More information is available online by clicking here.

I love the 80s

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flashback_iphone_1040Going through some boxes of old books that my mom brought over from their house, I found these among the forgotten gems in those dusty old boxes.  Pac Man themed Archie, a guide to defeating that darn Rubik’s Cube, and an orientation to my beloved Apple //c.

I was among the first to get that new Apple computer, a pseudo-portable version of the Apple //e.  Sure, it had a handle, but it was like stapling a handle to your PC.  The power supply was external, there was no battery, and you had to lug a monitor with you as well.  Still, it was a capable and dependable little computer.  I soon shrugged off this paperback for the ring-bound Technical Reference Manual as I started digging into the guts of the machine.

I like Archie comics as a teenager.  I’m not sentimental about them, really, I just think it was cool to find one with a Pac Man theme on the cover.  I’m sentimental about THAT.

Maybe it’s time to take another crack at the Rubik’s Cube.  I never had the patience for it as a kid.  This summer somebody handed me a Pyraminx, the tetrahedral equivalent of the cube, and I was still able to solve it in under two minutes.  That pesky block, though, always bested me.  Perhaps I should read this book and give it another go!

Among the other treasures I found are piles of old Peanuts paperbacks, which I plan to share with my kids.  Peanuts cartoons are timeless, insightful, and the star of countless hours of my childhood.  I’m excited to sort through the rest of these and find appropriate places on my bookshelves to make them available for our family.  While I love archiving things digitally, there’s just something about having a book to draw from the shelves.  These are one of my favorite parts of the 80s.