housing crisis

i usually get assignments that are ordinary, around county stuff. most of it is good news which i think is a finer point of the SCR. however, i've had to do 2 shoots at the humane society both about overcrowding. this story is pretty sad. i usually think of stray mutts at the humane society but when i was in there recently it looked like dogs lining up for a show. a lot of full breed family pets that were pushed out. not trying to go all sarah mclaughlin on you but it really made me want to adopt a bunch of animals. here are a couple of my saddest pics.

met this guy in a dark alley...

oh wait no this was sports blast on 280... sorry i was thinking of someone else.

if you could only see....

tonic released this song 12 years ago... 12 years ago! you officially are not young if you remember this song. when this song came out, 12 years before that songs like Hall & Oats "Out of Touch", Michael Jackson's "Thriller" & Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" were being released. And those songs seemed ancient in 1996... but now all my alt rock favorites are some young punks "oldies".

so last sunday i was asked to cover this benefit which i also shot last year. this year the headliner was Emerson Hart... former lead singer of Tonic. i almost didn't stay because it was getting late etc and i wasn't expecting much. for some reason i am always surprised when a professional singer actually sounds good. i don't know why, i just don't expect much out of singers these days. Emerson Hart sounded great. he basically performed a consolidated Tonic's greatest hits ... though i'm sure he'd rather us know him for his new stuff. anyway quite an unexpected treat that made me feel more like an out of touch 30 year old (i'm not really 30). but at least i had 200 drunks there with me to help me make it through.

glass class

this is a glass making class at the university of montevallo. i kept waiting to get branded by one of these pokers but the students were especially careful and attentive to my clumsiness.

the thing i found most amazing besides the fact that people ten years younger than me were skillfully using 2,000 degree ovens, was that these students worked for about an hour tediously creating their glass bowl... they would shape it and reheat it, dye it and reheat it, over and over again. .. then at the end they would have to separate the rod from the glass. half the time it breaks and half the time its a clean cut. one of the students that day actually did have their glass break at the very end. i thought it was pretty dramatic to put that much work into something knowing that in the very last step it could all be ruined. that's why i love art. people will sacrifice so much and risk coming out empty handed just for the chance at something beautiful. they did have some make it all the way through and they were very much worth it.

grayben

alright so clearly i am in procrastination mode right now since i've posted twice in 3 hours.

there's usually a lot of crying in our house between 5-7pm. not complaining because that really is the only time there is crying but when it rains it pours. so today grayben went on 2 shoots and out to lunch. he is quite social so he didn't choose to sleep through any of those events. this guaranteed a solid 2 hours of crying for our dinner time entertainment.

erin was cooking dinner so she brought him to me while i was working and for about 20 minutes he cried his eyes out while in my arms staring at the computer screen... maybe they were bad pictures but i'm betting it was sleep deprivation. i can stand it a bit longer than erin but i still have my breaking point. my philosophy is to make more noise than him whick usually works. so with the incessant wailing in my ear, i pulled up itunes and "kicked" a little alicia keys. as soon as the beat started he stopped crying. it was like magic. funny thing was that a kids song that we sing to him came on after alicia keys and he started crying again. so i guess i'm gonna have to start brushing up on my hip hop.

i decided this little story would be a bit more realistic set to a slideshow, so i found some pics on my desktop and set them to grayben's new favorite artist.

Here's the slideshow

fall portraits

tis the season for pictures with pumpkins and hay bales!

photo essays

recently i sold my artistic soul to corporate america. i'll borrow a line from the greatest movie of my era and opinion, Oh Brother Where Art Thou.... "for that you traded your everlasting soul?" "well i wasn't using it." quite true of me recently... i sure wasn't using it. just like Tommy Johnson it's kindof worked out... now I get to get better at my art while working for the man. although in retrospect i should have brokered a deal to play guitar better too.

so anyway, i've really enjoyed my gigs so far. i do think it's advancing me as a photographer and a lot of the time i get creative license to come it with what I think are the best shots. nothing like being judged creatively by thousands of people. this was a photo essay from my first week at the fair.