The Curator's Choice

Photographer, Carey Primeau recently started a photo blog on which he posts one image from Flickr each day. Today he was kind enough to choose one of my pictures. This is a shot from inside the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield Illinois. I had been traveling around the state searching out images for my Land of Lincoln project. The last stop on my tour was Springfield which is (obviously) filled with Lincoln imagery. I was checking out Lincoln's Home and the restored, surrounding neighborhood with my sister, Cassie, when she pointed out this pair of women and dared me to take their photo. At the time I was only carrying my TTR duaflex camera which shoots extremely wide angle shots so, despite my best efforts, I wasn't really able to get a satisfactory picture of the ladies. About two hours later, and a few miles away, we were being harassed by some guy at the museum trying to sell us a season pass or something, when Cassie pointed over my shoulder. I turned and saw the ladies again. We had accidentally been stalking them. Luckily I'd now started carrying my second camera and had just enough time to snap off this one shot. Later a security guard tried to kick us out of the museum, claiming I was taking pictures of their copyright protected exhibits. In fact, I only took pictures in the areas where the docent said it was allowed.

Anyway, my thanks to Cassie and to Carey. Hopefully I'll make it onto his site again sometime.

04-18-95

I've been wanting to show off this terrific portrait of me from 1995, so here it is. I clearly remember being in the air with bended knees, not quite seated yet, when the "photographer" snapped the picture. I tried to protest but she wouldn't have any of it. Later, when the license popped out of the machine, I was satisfied, even with the crooked grin on my face. I absolutely can't remember ever owning those glasses, but man that hair is memorable for sure. It was the one day of my life when my hair was awesome. I've been striving to get it to look exactly like this again ever since.

Too Risky? Too Adult?

The old insomnia kicked in this morning at around 5:30 so I just got up and did some work on this guy. I fell asleep again around 10:00 and didn't get up until after 2:00 p.m. Now my carefully cultivated sleep schedule is going to be totally screwed up.

Big Sale

Tonight I went out for a little while to test my camera's low light shooting capabilities. When driving around, I've been keeping a mental list of good looking things that deserve to have their pictures taken. I hit them tonight. One of the locations was a tiny, little tree on the corner with a streetlight shining down upon it. I went there to shoot it but then I remembered that the last time I looked at it was the day before daylight savings (in October back when trees still had leaves on them.) Tonight it looked lonely and boring and it had a huge, ugly squirrel's nest right in the middle of it. Anyway, I still managed to get these two shots that I'm pretty happy about. The first is one of the suddenly ubiquitous blank and/or shredded billboards that seem to be popping up everywhere and the other is the controversial, local adult clothing store, Slightly Sinful.