Author Archives: Tom Harold

Unexpected

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I snapped this one for the heck of it as I was leaving the coffee shop today. It really was an afterthought, or maybe a castoff thought. I realized I was losing all my daylight, and that my photo for today might wind up being something around the house after it had gotten dark. I didn’t want to do that, so I figured, “Oh, I’ll try this ‘shooting into the sun thing’ again and see how it turns out.” The clouds and the trees happened to line up well, but I didn’t think it would look as interesting as it does now. It’s not prize-winning, but I love what the light did around the clouds. I hope to try this out again in the future, hopefully sans powerlines.

Big Iron

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Was up at my folks’ place on Saturday, and the locals have a tradition of driving their old and interesting vehicles down onto the town square around dinner time. We all piled into dad’s ’27 Ford and putted over there to join in the fun. As we were walking around, this older gentleman pulled up and proceeded to park a full-size vintage Brockway semi tractor parallel as if he were driving nothing bigger than a Honda, air brakes and all! It ruled. I had to shoot this thing. I’ve never seen a restored semi tractor, and this one was awesome. My favorite shot was just this grille emblem. I wish they still put as much panache into emblems as they did back during the golden years of the automobile.

Portrait of Gloom

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Luxury.

Luxury.

Friday night the band played a place we haven’t played in probably ten years. Bossman told me, “I think they’ve cleaned the place up a little since then.” The creepy thing about that statement is that it implies that the place, in fact, needed cleaning up. Once I got there, I pretty much decided that “cleaning up” meant replacing the broken glass in the front door and moving the stage to another side of the room. I’m not that picky, though. We got paid, and the sound on stage was actually really good. I was a bit troubled by the bottle of Listerine I saw in the milk crate that held all the microphones. This antiseptic implies that the mics, in fact, needed cleaning up. I tried to keep my mouth away from mine. Fortunately, I’ve been at this a few years, and I handled it with grace and aplomb and still sounded like a million bucks.

Like the photo of the back room? It was either the band’s back room, or a storage closet for the Listerined sound equipment. Busted and completely filthy mirror in front of me, something resembling a busted paper towel rack on the right wall, and on the left wall there were a bunch of handprints made with what was either blood or red paint. I didn’t investigate further. The floor was special as well, but I was so exhausted after the second set break that I fell asleep on it anyway, keeping my head propped up with some of the drummers soft cases.

I live the life. I do, I do.

It’s All About the Light

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Yeah, would have been better with woods or a canyon or whatever, but still!

Yeah, would have been better with woods or a canyon or whatever, but still!

Not much for the scenery on this one, but look at the colors! Sunsets I tend not to do so much, mainly because seems like they get done too much, plus I always worry I’ll burn the thing into the back of my eye, but this was so orange and spectacular I just averted the eyeball and gave the shutter a click. Nice orange? I think so. Would have been a stellar time to be photographing an orange car, like a ’49 Mercury – thing would have glowed like a meteor!

Floral Niftiness

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I wish I’d gotten that butterfly with its wings open, but you can’t have everything, now can you? Especially when you take a photo from your driver’s seat while waiting to make a left turn across two lanes of traffic. I shot this on my way out of work today. The big victory was rescuing it from the incorrect white balance setting I shot it at, which made the whole thing look visibly blue. Someone who knows more can probably easily tell I fiddled with the settings, but it’s still much better than how it looked as originally shot. Digital has some big advantages, yes indeed, and I’m slowly finding out how to make the most of them.

More Drawing

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Cooperative drawings with my friend Jem.

Cooperative drawings with my friend Jem.

Here’s more of the work from me and my friend Jem. This is from the second night of our efforts. She said she didn’t realize at first that it would take us so long to do them. I laughed. I’ve done one of these alone before, and it took something like two weeks of free time to do it, and it wasn’t nearly as big as even half of one of these. Super-fun stuff, though, we both agreed. She’s much better at the color blending than I am, which is adding a lot to the project. Can’t wait to see what they look like when they’re done!

Four Wheels and Death

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It really was a funny one. Guess you had to be there.

It really was a funny one. Guess you had to be there.

I went to the second shooting for the zombie extravaganza, “8 Wheels of Death” today. This is Lola, Zombie #1. As the first one infected, she is ultimately responsible for the rest of the roller arena killing each other (for the most part, anyway. A few of us live.). The crowd was getting some stage direction from Chris, and zombie material is really just ripe fodder for jokes. Moments later, Lola was chowing down on the skate-clad leg. Good times, people. Good times.

Gear

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The bassist laughed when I took this one. Still life with Coke, he asked.

Some days I’m so busy it’s tough to get any shots done. This day I spent the entire afternoon working on my lines for the zombie movie, so by the time I rolled into the gig at the gorgeous grounds of a park for a festival I had not one photo pixelated upon the memory card of my trusty Nikon. I snapped this moments before we started playing, and by the time we were done it was dark, I was exhausted, and my finger never got near the shutter button until the next day.

Live Music

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Live music on a Friday night.

Live music on a Friday night.

The band played at a festival Friday night, and I took the opportunity to try a few live band shots of the other performers. I don’t like to use flash ordinarily, but it was dark out by the time I was able to take photos, so I gave it a shot. This one didn’t turn out too bad. I’m still not sure about that whole flash thing, though.