Hitting up the 2019 backlog with a collection of pictures I took on the same day as when I took Taylan’s Senior pictures.
Some are of flowers. Some are of Naima. Some are of Logan and Mom leaving one of the worst restaurants we’ve ever eaten at.
Still a long ways to go with this backlog, but we’ll get there. You just have to believe!
Time for the 8th thrilling chapter of pictures from Fly Iowa.
Here is one lesson want to give everybody from these pictures. Clean your sensor. Particularly if you are going to be taking, say 1200 pictures, with most of them against a blue background. Dust spots really show up against a blue background and they can be a pain to take out in Photoshop.
It can be intimidating cleaning your photo sensor, but it actually isn’t as hard as one would think. That being said, you definitely need the proper equipment. That is all I have to say about that… at this time.
Only 400 Fly Iowa images left to curate.
Wow! 26 straight weeks of double digits! I’m so impressed!
But you didn’t come her to listen to me talk all tommyrot about participation rates. You came to see the submissions:
Monica Henning
Monica Henning
Monica Henning
Monica Henning
Elizabeth Nordeen
Kim Barker
Dawn Krause
Angie DeWaard
Aaron Barnett
Carla Stensland
Christopher D. Bennett
Shannon Bardole-Foley
Aaron Barnett
Aaron Barnett
Micky Augustin
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:
GOVERNMENT! What a great theme! But what is a GOVERNMENT image? A GOVERNMENT image is any image that relates to the GOVERNMENT. Which is actually more than you think. The police. GOVERNMENT. Firefighters. GOVERNMENT. Military. GOVERNMENT. Stop sign. GOVERNMENT. City park. GOVERNMENT. State park. GOVERNMENT. You get the idea.
I look forward to seeing your interpretations.
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A MESSAGE FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHY 139 RULES DIVISION
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.
Your submission needs to be emailed to bennett@photography139.com by 11 AM on the Monday of the challenge due date.
OR
I now allow people to text me their submissions. In the past, I had made exceptions for a couple people that aren’t real computer savvy, even though it was an inconvenience for me and required at least 3 extra steps for me. I am now lifting that embargo because I have a streamline way of uploading photos. I’m not giving out my phone number, but if you have it, you can text me.
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 governed Monday!
Another one of the Seniors that we are featuring here on Senior Sunday is Taylan Howard. We took a collection of Taylan’s Senior Pictures back in August. Taylan will be a 2020 graduate of Boone High School.
Here are a few of my favorite Taylan pictures from that day:
There will be plenty more pictures of Taylan coming up in these Senior Sunday posts!
The pictures from the folder 2009-09-27 come from a Saturday when I went down to Des Moines to watch Jen compete in the Des Moines Regatta and watched Iowa State beat Army in football.
All the pageantry that comes with Army coming to your stadium is pretty amazing. Iowa State was also schedule to play both Navy and Air Force, but both those games got cancelled after the Big 12 went to a 9 game conference schedule and some nonconference games had to be cancelled. I still wish those game would get rescheduled, but I know it will never happen.
I’m not sure if this was the last Des Moines Regatta that Jen ever competed in, but I’m pretty sure that it was.
By adding these pictures to the Photography 139 Gallery, I was able to restore the following historic “An Artist’s Notebook” entries to their original glory:
Next Saturday’s walk down memory lane will involve an Art Festival.
5 days of work from home in the book. Here is my strange positive from the day. I get to do a lot more self care. Let me explain.
I have to be at work at 7 AM. Which means if I shower in the morning I have to hit the shower, brush my teeth, hit the pits and be out the door as fast as possible.
After I get off work I usually don’t have that much free time. I burn the candles at both ends a little bit. Most of us probably do.
Now I have more time and I’m mostly stuck at home. I can take as long of a shower as I want. When I get out of the shower, I have time to take care of other business at my leisure. I’m not rushing out the door.
Now I don’t know how many times I wash my hands these days. But I’m guessing it is definitely in double digits. I wash them when I get up in the morning. I wash them every time I go to the bathroom (that isn’t new for the record). I wash my hands every time I eat. I wash them every time I get back from leaving the house. I think I even wash my hands before I go to bed. My hands are definitely starting to look and feel like the hands of a guy who washes his hands, a lot.
So now, I’m using a lot more lotion. Including, after I take my extra long shower, I lotion up. Including, my feet. I’m not ashamed to say that my feet are becoming very soft. If it wasn’t for the fact that feet are gross and disgusting, you would probably enjoy touching my feet.
Soft feet. A surprising bonus of working from home.
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Hitting up that 2019 backlog. With the unification of our youth group with the Baptist Church and the Central Christian Church we moved the Christmas Concert from it traditional Sunday night to a Wednesday night.
I took a few pictures of the concert.
The last Youth Group we had, I had the Senior High watch DOUBT. I don’t know that we will have a Youth Group for the rest of the year, so I guess those kids will never know if Phillip Seymour Hoffman did it!
You know, I thought that the hatred that some of the men I know, the ones that suffer from toxic masculinity, have for flower pictures was borderline obscene. That was I encountered the irrational hatred of my wasp photography.
They are fascinating, beautiful creatures. Learn to love them. Unless you’re allergic. Then learn to love them from a distance. A good distance.
But for all the haters that never gave a young wasp a chance to shine, I say “Peace” and this is the final set of wasp pictures from 2019. We out!
Drops mic.
Pick mic back up.
Seriously. You know what a bee does when it stings you? Rips out its butthole and dies*.
You know what a wasp does when it stings you? “It says, I’m just getting started son.”
I’ll just close with a joke:
A wasp expert walks into a record shop
He goes to the owner and asks if they have the new edition of wasp sounds 2020.
The record shop owner says that they have it in stock and asks if the wasp expert would like to listen too it before he buys.
The wasp expert agrees and the record is placed on the record player.
The pin goes down and all of a sudden a horrible buzzing noise emits from the machine.
The wasp expert is horrified stating that in all his years of being a wasp expert, he has never heard anything as far from wasp sounds in his life.
The record shop owner looks confused until he notices something.
“Sorry” says the record shop owner, “I was playing it on the bee side!”
Drops mic again.
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This is your reminder that this week’s theme for THE WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE is MUSIC:
A MUSIC photo is any photo of MUSIC being created or played or of anything that might be used to create or play MUSIC.
Happy photo harvesting!
*Yes, I know this is only honey bees.
Day 4 of working from home in the books. Another positive about working from home that I’ve discovered is the extra sleep. I didn’t think I would sleep in, but it turns out, I sleep in about an extra 45 minutes. The weird part is that Naima also sleeps in later too. I wasn’t expecting that.
Let’s see how Day 5 goes…
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Here is another collection of images from when Fly Iowa was in Boone:
Yes, I thought it was weird that the pilot of the Tuskegee Airmen plane was white.
Only 500 more Fly Iowa photos to curate!
I didn’t take a ton of pictures at Pufferbilly Days last year. Probably because there wasn’t a petting zoo. Probably because I didn’t really make more than an appearance at the parade. Probably because there really wasn’t much left by the time Sunday came around.
I did spend 3 days at Pufferbilly Days. Friday night with Willy at FNSC. Saturday I walked around with Suzie and her friend Michelle. On Sunday I went up and took pictures of my Pufferbilly Days Photo Contest entries, and Logan’s.
Here are a few pictures from Pufferbilly Days:
I think I will appreciate Pufferbilly Days a little more this year than in past years.
Day 3 of working from home. I thought I was going to talk about how a positive of working from home was how soft my feet are becoming. But I’ll cover that at a later date.
Today’s positive about working from home is that Naima has actually started to hang out in the office. Not a little bit, but more than she ever used to in the past. She has never been a big fan of the office and I’m sure that is because the office is probably the most cluttered, messed up room in my house. However, as I sit in the office way more than normal AND I also start cleaning and sorting and throwing things out in my office, she has broken down and started to hang out there.
On to Day 4…
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These pictures are from my backyard that I took back in August.
Wasps are the best!
