Being Overrun

Posted on September 11, 2009 by Tom Harold

If you upsize this photo (just click on it), you’ll see that the lowest light, the green one, has some kind of dusty sort of cobwebby-lookin’ thing all over it. That’s what it is – a dusty-looking cobweb. Okay, so it’s weird that there’s a cobweb on a street light, right? What’s weirder is that it’s not dusty. It’s fully of dead little midge-fly things. I don’t know what the hell these things are, but they are friggin’ everywhere around my neighborhood. They don’t bite, but spider webs have started popping up all over the place, like miniature tent cities of fly-trapping death. I’m all for it, really, as it reduces the alarming fly population, but they look pretty janky when they get all full of dead bugs and just sit there after the spider has moved on. The orb weavers are gettin’ fat in the Midwest this summer, folks. I have them all around the security lights near my back door. It’s kind of freaky how prevalent they are. I was beginning to worry that it was just from me not trimming back bushes or something and giving them a place to germinate or whatever, but two blocks away I notice that the freakin’ traffic light has cobwebs on it?!?!?! Yeah, not exactly restricted to me, and even weirder than having webs on my house. I keep waiting for news stories to start popping up on these things. I’d love to know what has caused them to be so overwhelming in number this year. Maybe there will be a swarm of biblical, yet harmless, proportions.

This is just weird. It’s not a great photo. It’s actually kind of crappy, but it’s WEIRD! Had to shoot it.

Fiery Return

Posted on September 10, 2009 by Tom Harold

I know we’ve covered this subject before, but I like the way this one turned out. It also just happened to be the most interesting thing I shot all day, so it won for pic of the day today. Oddly, this is a friend of mine doing the work. What’s odd is that he’s been doing this for three years, I’ve been hanging out at the art center for three years, and I just randomly ran into him the other night as I was walking by and leaving my photography club meeting. Funny how that works.

Another One Down! Victory!

Posted on September 9, 2009 by Tom Harold

My friend Jem and I finished this one just the other day. I’m stoked! It took us three weeks of one-nighters to get this one done. She took the other one home and is finishing it up this weekend. We’re going to start on some more like this, but maybe change it up a little bit somehow. Not quite sure how, but we’re going to change something about it. These are super fun to do. I love messing with different shapes and colors. She’s really good at blending stuff together, so I’m working on that a little. Anyway, here’s another completed project, and you all know how much I dig completed stuff. It’s a victory over all those things that keep us from achieving what we want with our creativity. It’s way cool.

Color Peelings

Posted on September 8, 2009 by Tom Harold

These are leftovers from working with all those colored pencils. I actually like the idea of this photo, if not the particular execution on this one. I’m saving up more shavings to try and have another go at it with some stuff that looks…I don’t know, not quite so flattened. These things get all mashed up if you move them around even a little bit. Picky!

Roll On

Posted on September 7, 2009 by Tom Harold

I finally got back to work on some rolling ball sculpture. I think I meant to do this two whole months ago. Progress is slow, but it is progressing. These are some of the parts for the marble lift assembly. I think I screwed something up, but I’ll fix it. You’ll never know!

Unexpected

Posted on September 6, 2009 by Tom Harold

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

Posted on September 5, 2009 by Tom Harold

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

Posted on September 4, 2009 by Tom Harold

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

Posted on September 3, 2009 by Tom Harold

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

Posted on September 2, 2009 by Tom Harold

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.