Daily Deercam

  Across the creek to screw a few metal cleats in a likely tree and check the cam.  Creek still up enough to make a dicey crossing.

  Creek cam as nutty as ever.  Crazy exposures and glow-in-the-dark deer.  I wouldn't bother posting a pure white file.  How hard can it be to make an auto exposure on a closed system?

Last night at Academy I looked at a bunch of cams.  Most of them take D batteries.  I don't want to get into buying batteries.  You spend a fortune, even if they do promise 60 days.  I doubt that.

  Scrapes untouched since the rain.  They tore them open, used them, then took a break.  One big deer print on the closer cam.  They are around.

Gassed

  Last night the Fabulous Redhead and I drove way down Broadway, nearly out of the county to wander the new Academy Store.  I wanted some screw-in tree climbing cleats and a rechargeable lantern battery to replace on that has given up the ghost.  On the way down we watched gas prices.  2.81 was the low.  My gas light was on but I was on momentary gas strike:  No gas for me until it was under 2.80.

  This morning at Brookshire's Grocery store: 2.63.  Going the right direction, and I notice this occurred without ANY help from the Government.  

  Just think if they actually HELPED.  We still haven't drilled ANWR.  We still haven't reduced the boutique gasolines they require.  Refining capacity about the same.  Nukes are expanding but they ought to be booming.

  Meanwhile, I am reducing my carbon footprint by hunting my own food and using rechargeables.

  Power to the people!

Update: 2.59 on Monday.

The Photographer's Equinox

  Image:  Half a cup of dice, 2003.

 Cake tonight in class- a big white Brookshires sheet cake celebrating the middle of the semester.  We are halfway done and they have digested the biggest portion of the material.  Now they just need tweaking and experience.  Plus I can pour it on.

  And we celebrated the Photographers Equinox.  That's the moment when tap water runs 68 degrees out of the cold side.  

  68 degrees is standard processing temperature for most photographic processes involving black and white materials and paper.  In Texas the water can run as hot as 89 degrees and as cold as 39.  As the temps rise and fall in the Autumn and Spring the water temp follows.  It's running about 72 now, but the rain and cold snap will push it down and I felt like celebrating.  This class is working very hard and very well.

  Couple of the last-rung-of-the-ladder folks were coming once and then skipping once.  They tended to have bad luck with cameras and film because of their tourist status.  I encouraged them to get focused and NOT TO QUIT!

  I think they have both now quit.  We'll miss them, but we are going on.

Daily Deercam

 Many blank shots (51 total files, more than half overexposed white rectangles), from across the creek but one shocked doe eating corn photographed over and over.  On the near side my deer were nervous- all looking at something together repeatedly.  No bucks on cam.  Scrapes open and running like mad.  New scrapes here and there.  Need to move a tree seat.

  I think they are looking at other deer.  But if it's a buck, it would be checking the area where they were after they left, I think.

  Bigfoot?

Daily Deercam

  Big deer crossing the creek going both ways.  I went over and moved a cam to the original scrape where I had a cam stolen.  Maybe the kids are in school and this one will stay on the tree.  Hot scrape going over there.

  Scrapes all over the corner of the pasture and woods edge on the bluff at the other cam.

  Only interesting photo from old reliable Moultrie was the image above.  The twin fawns are STILL nursing.  Some buck will run them off when she goes into rut.  Middle of October, still nursing.  She LOOKED like she was still nursing, but I hadn't seen it.

  This is a good mom.  Very successful deer to get two fawns this big without being run down.  She must not be nursing them much.

  Nothing like deercams.

UT Tyler Homecoming Parade

  A video I didn't even know I was going to make for a client.  Let's see how this one goes.

The Ides of April

  On the 13th of April I photographed a young woman who wanted some images while she was pregnant with her last child.  She brought her mom and her other two kids and I shot film and digital of them singly and in various poses and groupings in the studio.  It took a while to get the kids to smooth out, but we did it.  She seemed a happy, smart, connected and committed mom, just the sort any kid would want.  I was impressed.  I dragged out an old box of toys that hadn't been touched in five or six years for them to look through and let them each take one home.  I sent the proofs and heard from her once after the birth.  Then nothing.

  The Redhead and I ran late errands, banking at the grocery store and working our way through the Friday afternoon crowd with our bags.  We swung by Brady's coffee to get her car and Brady was waving me in.  I thought we were going to be lectured on leaving a car in one of his parking slots while elsewhere but it was something else.  The young woman who I had photographed had died and her parents were searching for the photographer.

  They found him.  I didn't pry into the details.  She seemed young and vital when she was in the studio.  The baby is healthy.

  What a reminder of the momentary blessings of life and the folly of taking the future for granted.  It can break your heart at any moment.  God bless these good people.

Good Government

  Government at all levels has disapointed and failed us in every way they COULD fail, with no end in sight.  Seems like we just lurch from crisis to crisis with no resolution, then the next headline takes over.

  Meanwhile gas has dropped to 2.98 here in town, with no help from state, local or the feds.

  Imagine what we could do if they just got the heck out of the way.

Desperate Housewives

  Haven't mentioned much about my one college basic photo section I'm teaching, but they've been enough fodder for a network hit TV series.  I've been having fun, just throwing everything at in the book at them- in the right order of course, and never letting them out of my sight in the lab or the classroom.  Just this week- on an assignment to photograph a chair- most of them finally ignited and started making real photographs.  

  I haven't shown them much work, so it hasn't occurred to them to copy anything- they are just working.

  So here's a typical story:  The Chair Assignment.  I've given this every semester I ever taught- probably GOT given this assignment by John Beck at Sam Houston State back nearly 40 years ago.  (I'll ask Doc. Sneed.  He'll remember.)  The assignment is: Notice and photograph a chair.   I lecture and give the assignment to them while they stand around in class....I've put all the chairs out in the hall.  I talk about the life of a chair, how civilization was built on chairs, chairs I've known, et, et.  

  Then they start looking at chairs and making photographs.

  One of the students, a delightful, sensible, grown woman, never misses a class and is sitting on the front row taking notes.  Family, job, home, kids, she's a normal person in all outward aspects.  Driving home she spots a busted plastic walmart chair in a pile of junk on the curb.  She sends her husband back for this ruined useless chair.  Like the good husband he is, he gets it.  She takes her son into the back yard and has him THROW the chair into the air, over and over, while she photographs it.  In the sky.

  A chair.  In the sky.  Yes.

  As I say, I have made a few chair photographs, loved chairs, noticed chairs, thought about chairs but it hasn't occured to me in 40 years of exhibitions to ever THROW a chair up against the sky and photograph it.  Nor have I ever seen any other student do it.

  This makes the whole semester- and it's been a very fun and invigorating semester, worth the time and effort.  I've been wedging, photo-fuing and mental-judoing these folks like mad to get them to open up just a LITTLE bit visually.  When I saw that chair on the contact sheet...soaring against the sky, I knew I was doing the job I was hired to do and that these were real students.

   

Deercam News Flash!

Well, for Butler Creek and Smith County, at least- deer scrapes just showed up on the bluff over one of the deer cams. They had been dug up in the last 48 hours and hit sometime this morning. Walking in I saw running tracks from a large deer- I'm assuming the bucks are spreading out and claiming territory.
Might move a cam to watch the scrapes.
Weather is sharply cooler. Just does and fawns on the deercam.

Panola County Gun Club Championship, 2008

 The 2008 Championship video from the Oct 4 match.  Notice how polite and happy these heavily armed and competent people are.  Shocking.  I thought assault rifles were supposed to drive folks mad with hostility and anger.

  Zero Viewers so far.  Be the first!

  Update I:  Sorry, wrong video linked, or another added later.  The Krag shooting is for Griff Murphey so his kids can watch him shoot his old rifle.  The Panola Club Championship is the next one.

  Cranking out these videos.  I have two more Camp Perry famous Distinguished Riflemen that I haven't even put in the editor yet.

Update II:  I'm Uncle-anched!  Really, it's not as painful as it sounds!  I've been determined to get some educational and informative realistic shooting videos out on Youtube.  It's working.

Update III: If you come over on a Uncle or Snowflake-alanche, gird up your loins, drive your ox and haul your ass over to Youtube to check out the rest of the videos on the Blackfork6 Channel.  Description?  Gunsgunsgunsgunsgunsgunsgunsguns.  Shootshootshootshootshootshootshootshoot.

Billy C. Atkins: Distinguished Rifleman

  Video up.  Proud to get Billy Atkins in the series.  I caught him at Camp Perry in August, along with his wife Valerie and his son Daniel.  Great folks.

  Billy has a National Trophy named after him due to his achievements as a shooter.  He talks about that.   He's retired but coaches the Georgia Junior Teams.