Here is another post from the 2018 backlog. These are mostly pictures of Naima. I think they might have been alternates for the WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE theme the week they were taken. I’m not entirely sure and I’m not up to that level of soul searching and research.
There is still more in the 2018 backlog, but it is getting smaller every day. Well maybe not every day.
Now seems like as good of a time as any to check back in with THE SELFIE PROJECT and see what “amazing” things I did in the month of May. Some of these things I had already forgot about!
May 4
May 5
May 6
May 7
May 8
May 9
May 11
May 12
May 15
May 17
May 18
May 19
May 21
May 23
May 25
May 26
May 27
May 29
May 31
I think June is off to a decent start. I haven’t done anything amazing, besides see GODZILLA KING OF MONSTERS. But at least I’m 99% sure I’ll be leaving the state to go on a mission trip. So that’ll be something.
A few Saturdays back I went out to Long Park with Johnathan and Logan to test Rodan139 out as there were some quirky things that happened with it on the previous day when I took it to Don Williams. Turned out it was more of a phone update issue than anything and was nothing to worry about. Rodan139 is fine and dandy. At least for right now.
The videos I took of Logan and Johnathan will show up on the YouTube channel at some point, but that point isn’t exactly soon.
While we were out there, it was the perfect time to knock off Pages 84 & 85 of THE PHOTO JOURNAL PROJECT. This idea is stolen, I mean “influenced” by an illustration I once saw.
Page 85 – Photograph a truth.
I don’t want you to think the truth is that Logan and Johnathan don’t get along. They certainly do. In fact, Johnathan, Logan, and Brandon worked like a seamless machine just the other day while hanging ceiling drywall at my Mom’s house.
For those wondering about the knives. Logan is holding my basement knife that is mostly used for opening popcorn bags. It was gifted to me by Vest. Johnathan is holding by upstairs knife. It is mostly used to open up UPS packages. That knife belonged to my Dad.
I did consider using my car knife, which was gifted to me by Kim, but it was left in my car and Johnathan drove.
More Photo Journal Project coming.
Seems like a good time to share my favorite pictures from THE SELFIE PROJECT from April.
I’ve been trying to be more interesting with the pictures, or at least more interesting with my life, since it felt like in January and February I didn’t do anything.
I don’t know if I’m accomplishing that or not, but at least in the month of
April I did leave the Cyclone State once. So that is something.
Here are my favorites from April:
April 3
April 5
April 6
April 7
April 8
April 9
April 12
April 14
April 16
April 17
April 18
April 19
April 21
April 23
April 24
April 27
April 28
April 30
As of this writing, I haven’t taken my picture for today, but my May 1 picture does involve a giant check, so May is shaping up to be quite the month!
Reminder that tomorrow night the Boone First United Methodist Church Youth Group will be holding a fundraiser for their mission trip to Rapid City, South Dakota in June:
Cost is a free will donation. Come eat some delicious spaghetti. Throw a few ducats into the till. Heck, even stick around and enjoy a wonderful worship service. Support a good cause and borderline great kids!
Hope to see many of you there!
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While I work on the 2018 backlog, the most recent folder I cleared out was from pictures I took on Mother’s Day.
They range from pictures of my nephews grilling to pictures of me working on a self-portrait project (that heavily involves updating classic Photography 139 image “Blue Steel”) and pictures of Naima.
Enjoy:
The original “Blue Steel” was considered too sexy to hang on the wall of Salon 908. I’m not going to bother trying to get Blue Steel Redux on any public walls. However, one of them could be part of the Canvas Wall Project.
A couple months back I was cruising back from Big Creek and I saw an interesting bird sitting on a fence.
I pulled over and snapped a few photos.
Have a looksie:
Hopefully next Friday I’ll be back on track with THE PHOTO JOURNAL PROJECT. I guess we’ll see.
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This is your reminder that the WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE theme this week is FAMILY:
A FAMILY photo is a photo of a FAMILY or anything that is related to a FAMILY. Don’t let anybody else’s limited definition of FAMILY constrain you!
Happy photo harvesting!
Looks like another rough week for THE WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE. Only a few people were able to communicate the theme COMMUNICATION. Might be time to look into retiring THE WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE.
But you didn’t come here to listen to me talk all tommyrot about participation rates. You came to see the submissions!
Kim Barker
Tamara Peterson
Christopher D. Bennett
Shannon Bardole-Foley
But enough dwelling on the past. Time to look to the future. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future! This week’s theme:
FAMILY! What a great theme! Unless your FAMILY sucks, then you have more problems that dealing with THE WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE.
So what is a FAMILY picture? A FAMILY picture is any picture that involves a FAMILY. Now some people have a really strict DNA based definition of a family because they weren’t hugged enough as a child. Don’t feel constrained by somebody else’s definition of a FAMILY.
I look forward to seeing your interpretations!
A MESSAGE FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHY 139 RULES DIVISION
1. The picture has to be taken the week of the theme. This isn’t a curate your pictures challenge. This is a get your butt off the couch (my personal experience) and put your camera in your hands challenge. Don’t send me a picture of you next to the Eiffel Tower, when I know you were in Iowa all week. I will point out that I have let that slide some in the past. I will not in the future. Since it is literally about the only rule.
2. Your submission needs to be emailed to bennett@photography139.com by 11 AM on the Monday of the challenge due date. It should be pointed out that this blog auto-publishes at 12:01 on Mondays. So it wouldn’t hurt to get your picture in earlier.
That is it, them’s the rules.
A MESSAGE FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHY 139 SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION DIVISION
Nobody showed class, taste, and sophistication this week by signing up for a Photography 139 email subscription. I’ll try and do better next week.
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That’s all I got for today, so if the good Lord’s willin’ and the creek don’t rise, we will commune right here again next Monday. Hopefully it will be a very familial Monday.
I hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving! It is the time of year where we are supposed to count our blessings.
I thought I would share a few of my current blessings:
I have plenty of friends that share my love for the Cyclones!
I have a job I don’t hate going to, where I work with several people I don’t want to punch in the face.
I have an amazing church family!
I have an amazing friends family!
I’m blessed to share my life with Naima!
This is really just a handful of the blessings in my life! But I’m already getting this out late, so I’ll cut if off here. I’ll just end with a passage from a Rob Bell NOOMA video that really spoke to me:
“So the verse in First Timothy, it says command those that are rich to not put their hope in wealth… and then it goes on and it continues… and it says, but to put their hope in God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.
That phrase, a God that richly provides us with everything. All that we have is a gift.
Food. It is a gift.
Clothes. Gift.
Roof. Gift.
That breath you just took. It’s a gift.
Now there are some that will say: No, you don’t understand. I’ve worked for what I have. I deserve it. It is mine. But like it says in the book of Deuteronomy, Chapter 8: You may say to yourself, my power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me. But remember the Lord your God, because it is God that gives you the ability to produce wealth.”
I thank God for the embarrassment of riches in my life!
There are 3 sets of images to be found in the collection of pictures in the folder 05-12-08.
The first set are pictures from a Mother’s Day celebration at my Mom’s house.
The second set are a collection of pictures of flowers at my Mom’s house. A Mother’s Day Peony and a tulip.
The final set of pictures is from the first part of making a batch of Little White Lye Soap.
By adding these pictures to the Photography 139 Photography Gallery I was able to restore the following historic “An Artist’s Notebook” entries to their original glory:
On our next walk down the lane of memories, we will look at the first Jaycees activity I participated in. All the signs were there, I wasn’t paying attention.
So here is the first journal entry. I felt like having as pretentious sounding name as possible for my journal. I have a few goals about this journal. My main goal is just to actually write in it. My second goal is to be as truthful as possible towards my true thoughts and feelings. I have another journal on another website, but it is really just a collection of sarcastic statements and cheap jabs at open faced sandwiches. This journal is meant to be about what my achievements and failures are in the world of art. What projects I am working on and what I have accomplished and what I have failed to accomplish. What I am photographing and what I am thinking about entering in photo contests. What I am thinking about. It might not always make sense. It might just be things I need to write down because they strike me as poignant or inspirational. This is in a small way an online “idea box”.
I do also have a goal of producing something that makes me worthy of having a pretentious sounding journal title like: “An Artist’s Notebook”.
With those words on August 9, 2006 this blog burst into the world with the blog entry titled:
Now here we are 4294 days later and I’m posting journal entry number 3,000.
The blog has changed quite a bit over the years. It started out as a blog that I physically coded and added to a website that I physically coded back when my website was hosted on Frank’s basement server. Then, I moved it to a third party company called Blogger. If you visit this URL, you can still see its pathetic remains:
After that, I still used Blogger, but I published An Artist’s Notebook to the server that currently hosts my website. The content was the same, but the URL changed. If you click on the link below, you can still see it’s pathetic remains, that are identical to the Blogger URL remains:
Well before this, I had changed my website over to WordPress. Even though WordPress has very powerful blogging tools, it wasn’t until March of 2010 that I started using WordPress and An Artist’s Notebook moved to (hopefully) its final URL:
Last time I posted that An Artist’s Notebook had reached a milestone number of posts, I received a bunch of congratulations. I was confused by this because I didn’t feel it was necessarily an accomplishment. After all, I basically was just too stupid to quit. Just plugging along in relative obscurity, with a few loyal subscribers that send me emails or leave comments on the blogs scattered across the globe earth. A smarter person would have just stopped by now.
But instead, other than a slight walking away from An Artist’s Notebook back in the spring of 2015, nevertheless he persisted.*
I don’t know if just persisting is an accomplishment, but looking at the earlier formats for An Artist’s Notebook, I see that I used to link to several other blogs, that have either stopped updating or are just simply gone with the wind.
I have to give props to the other people who are also too dumb to quit:
I’m still here. Let’s not make a big deal of it.
Even though An Artist’s Notebook is meant to complement the rest of the Photography 139 website and universe, I actually didn’t post a photo in the blog until a good 3 months after I started it. On October 20, 2006 history was made with the blog post:
This was the first picture ever posted to An Artist’s Notebook:
A picture of a groundhog that lived behind the computer mine.
Although the seal was broken the floodgates didn’t exactly open. I didn’t post an image again until December 31, 2006. That picture was the back page of the the 2007 Photography 139 calendar.
The picture flood gates really opened on January 5, 2007 with this post:
And these 2 photos:
The rest, has been photographic history.
An observant reader of An Artist’s Notebook would have notice that my Saturday post walking down memory lane are partially done so that I can have a look at my old images and partially done so I can restore my old blog posts to their original glory. The reason why this is necessary is because in addition to having gone through several ways to post a blog, I also went through several hosting options for my photos.
The first one was a company known as Photobucket. Photobucket was a good free option. I used it from October 2006 up until October 2008.
I abandoned Photobucket because eventually I was going to outgrow their limits. Recently they stopped allowing people to embed images stored with them, so if you were to click on a journal entry from May 2008 to October 2008, you’d see something like this:
After Photobucket, I decided to host my pictures with a MySQL-PHP photo gallery called Coppermine. I ran with Coppermine from November 2008 until July 2011. I left those galleries up for several years, even though you couldn’t access them unless you had a direct URL. Also by leaving them up, pictures would still show up on the website. Unfortunately, those galleries were used to hack my website and take it down a few years back. As a result, I had to completely delete the galleries to close the security loophole in my website. So until I get the journal entries from November 2008 until July 2011 restored to their original glory, they will look something like this:
Then in April of 2011 I was hired to be the photographer for the American Red Cross Young Heroes event. They wanted to have a way that people could go to my website and buy pictures. I didn’t actually have a way to do that, so I needed to find one. I ended up with Smugmug. It was a service that a professional photographer I knew used and recommended. You can store unlimited photos there and people can buy them directly from your website.
It took me a few months to realize that the Smugmug was the future of my photo hosting. It has unlimited data storage and it stores full resolution images.
That unlimited full resolution pictures is a pretty big deal because I have currently uploaded 45,005 images/videos that take up 395.59 GB of hard drive space. Probably not going to be slowing down any time soon on that front, either.
Also, if anybody every wanted to buy a print or a coffee mug or a puzzle or a mouse pad or a ceramic tile or a mahogany desk organizer or playing cards or photo key tag or coasters or a phone case with one of my pictures on it, they can do it straight from the website. Don’t worry people who submit photos for the WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE. Those photos are not for sale on the website. Either are pictures from Graceland or of Iowa State athletic events. I can’t sell those for legal reasons.
While people can go to the gallery and leave comments on pictures and rate them up to 5 stars (hint: this will be how Pufferbilly Day Photo Contest and possibly Boone County Fair entries will be determined this year), the way I determine the most popular images is by views. Views statistics go back one year.
These are the 10 most popular Photography 139 Images (by views) of the last 10 Months:
#9 – Johnathan Stensland – 1,261 Views – Taken for THE 9 EMOTIONS PROJECT in the Photography 139 Studio
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#8 – Brett Meyer – 1,403 Views – Taken at the Iowa State vs. Kent State football game in 2007
#7 – Sioux Falls – 1,428 Views – Taken on my South Dakota Road Trip with my Mom
#6 – Nora – 1,493 Views – Taken at the Irish Fair in Saint Paul, Minnesota
#5 – Graffiti – 1,707 Views – Taken in downtown Ames for ART for the WPC
#4 – Reflection – 1,762 Views – Taken in Ledges for REFLECTION for the WPC
#3 – Angel Ornament – 3,197 Views – Willow Angel Ornament taken in my Mom’s house
#2 – Ground Squirrel – 3,732 Views – Ground squirrel on top of a shepherd’s hook at my Mom’s house
#1 – With Alisa – 9,541 Views – Taken at Winter Jam in 2017 for THE SELFIE PROJECT
The following are links to the 5 Most Popular Photography 139 Photo Galleries:
#4 – Weekly Photo Challenge – Year 5 – Alternates
#3 – Weekly Photo Challenge – Year 5 (34,203 Views)
I also use a category system to organize my posts so that a person could find all the posts on a certain topic or a certain person. This is far from a scientific system and it is a moving target as I am re-categorizing old entries as I restore them. I’m trying to get rid of some of the more generic categories like “Photography” or “Life” or “Family” or “Friends” or “Religion”. But this is an ongoing process.
#3 – WPC (Formerly RWPE) – WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE – 432 Posts
#7 – Personal Photo Project – 259 Posts
#3 – WPC (Formerly RWPE) – WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE – 432 Posts
If you are relatively new and are wondering what the heck a “Personal Photo Project” is, it came about at a time where I seemed to be working on a ton of other photo projects (for various entities) and seemed to be getting pulled a way from the pure joy of photography. At that time I decided to work on a Personal Photo Project once a week to keep photography from becoming a grind.
You may be looking at the list and wondering, “what can I do to improve my Photography 139 Q Score?”
First, I should point out that these aren’t necessarily the people that have influenced by photography the most. That would be my Dad by having photography in the house. My Mom for buying me my first camera. Olivia for loving flower photography. The favicon on this website was her favorite flower picture. Carla and Teresa for doing photography with our Dad. The list could continue, but you get the idea.
However, these are the people that most influence this blog.
But about that Q-Score thing…
Obviously, the easiest way is to submit photos to the WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE. You could also volunteer to be a photo assistant on photo projects. Pose for THE 9 EMOTIONS PROJECT. Head out on the open road with me. Join an organization that I am in. Commission me to do work for you (i.e. photograph your baby, wedding, family, senior picture, work holiday card, church directory, soap, leather goods).
Follow those simple suggestions and someday, when we hit blog post number 3,500, you could see yourself in the Photography 139 Top 10. After all, Sara, you are knocking right on the door!
I also decided to update my profile pictures for Twitter and Instagram and Smugmug. Here is the new one below:
That should work for another year or so!
I think that more than covers where the Photography 139 community currently sits. Until next time!
*I hope Elizabeth Warren doesn’t mind my appropriating this phrase. I guess it was accidentally created by a half man-half turtle creature and I am at least half a man. No turtle. I’ve had a grudge against turtles since The Great Turtle Race was fixed back in 2016. Sorry Mitch.
