The July image from the 2022 Calendar is a picture of an Easter lily.
Tomorrow I will share the August image.
Last Saturday a few people got together at Teresa’s house to make Christmas treats. I stopped by to take a few pictures.
I think next year Johnathan, Logan, and Brandon might get an invite. However, I’m not in charge, so we’ll see.
The January image for the 2022 Photography 139 Calendar is an image I took for THE WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE. It is of a corn crib (methinks) that was blown askew by the derecho. It is slightly east of Boone on US-30.
Tomorrow I will reveal the February image.
Thus far, CANDID PORTRAIT has proven to be a very popular theme.
But you didn’t come here to listen to me talk all tommyrot about participation rates. You came to see the submissions:
Elizabeth Nordeen
Carla Stensland
Carla Stensland
Carla Stensland
Shannon Bardole-Foley
Christopher D. Bennett
Tamara Peterson
Jesse Howard
Jen Ensely-Gorshe
Angie DeWaard
Jen Ensley-Gorshe
Teresa Kahler
Michelle Haupt
Kio Dettman
Micky Augustin
Logan Kahler
Dawn Krause
Logan Kahler
Logan Kahler
Cathie Raley
Sara Lockner
Sara Lockner
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:
HOLIDAYS! What a great theme for Year 8 of THE WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE! But wait, I thought the themes were random? Seems also convenient that HOLIDAYS is the theme the same week as Christmas? Yeah, it does seem convenient. Perhaps even desperately random…
But what exactly is a HOLIDAYS image? Simply put, a HOLIDAYS image is just any image that suggest the celebration of a HOLIDAY. Opening presents, decorations, making treats, hanging with family or friends or co-workers. There are so many possibilities! And yes, Christmas is this week, but that doesn’t mean you can’t go to the basement and pull out your favorite Arbor Day decoration and take a picture of that.
While considering your possible subjects for your HOLIDAYS image, consider the following quote:
A lovely thing about Christmas is that it’s compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together.
-Garrison Keillor
The picture has to be taken between 12:01 PM today and 11 AM next Monday. This isn’t a curate your photos project. This is a get your butt off the couch (unless you are taking your picture from the couch) and take pictures challenge.
You can send your images to either bennett@photography139.com OR you may text them to my Pixel 5.
That is all I got, so if the good Lord’s willin’ and the creek don’t rise, we will all be sharing our idea of HOLIDAYS in this place that is little more than where I go for my personal holidays next Monday.
This year for our family Thanksgiving I wanted to attempt to make root beer. I had Glenn Peterson’s recipe in hand and I also fruitlessly pursued another recipe, but I’m not really sure how different root beer recipes can get.
Glenn’s recipe was a little vague on a couple things, but it goes like this:
Recipe for homemade root beer (X 2 for 10 gal water cooler)
4 lbs. sugar
3 ½ gallon water
1 bottle Root beer extract
1 bottle Root beer flavor
4 lbs. dry ice.Add 4 lbs. sugar to 3 ½ gal water. Stir until sugar dissolved. Add 1 bottle root beer extract and 1 bottle root beer flavor. Stir until mixed. Add 4 lbs. of dry ice ½ to 1 hour before serving. Use gloves when working with dry ice. Dry ice will cause the container to look like a witches’ caldron. Do not stir nor put a lid on container. When “steam” from the dry ice disappears, root beer is ready to drink.
This recipe was shared with Glenn while in the Army. He started sharing it with Pack 150, Madrid at the Blue & Gold Banquets/ Crossovers and Arrow of Lights Ceremony from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts.
Glenn’s widow Tamara shared the recipe with me a couple years ago.
The one thing I didn’t know is how much is 1 bottle of root beer extract and how much is one bottle of root beer flavor. I compared it to other root beer recipes and determined Glenn’s recipe calls for a 2 oz bottle of each. I changed his recipe slightly. I used 1 4 oz bottle of Shank’s root beer extract.
Johnathan and Logan assisted in the making of my first batch of what I am calling Sneaky Snake Root Beer. Here are some pictures:
Logan is wearing some of my Mom’s old dish gloves.
This is one of my favorite family pictures ever.
I decided on the name for my root beer on Saturday while cruising around Monroe County with Teresa. I was originally going to name it after Naima sorta and call it something like Gold Dog Root Beer, so I could put her mug on the bottles. However, I decided to name it after an old family memory. Maybe I was feeling nostalgic because Thanksgiving this year was obviously bittersweet at it was the first major holiday we’ve had without Mom. But I decided to base the name off the Tom T. Hall song “Sneaky Snake”.
When I was a kid and we would go down to my Dad’s darkroom, the music was mostly provided by his 8 track collection. My favorite of his 8 tracks was blue. It was Tom T. Hall’s Greatest Hits Volume II. I can’t swear that it was Volume II, but it was pretty close. My favorite song on this 8 track was “Sneaky Snake”. I still love that song, even though next to nobody outside of my family seems to appreciate its greatness.
The lyrics are:
Boys and girls take warning
If you go near the lake
Keep your eyes wide open
And look for sneaky snake
Now, maybe you won’t see him
And maybe you won’t hear
But he’ll sneak up behind you
And drink all your root beerAnd then sneaky snake goes dancing
Wiggling and a-hissing
Sneaky snake goes dancing
A-giggling and a-kissing
I don’t like old sneaky snake
He laughs too much you see
When he goes wiggling through the grass
It tickles his underneathWell sneaky snake drinks root beer
And he just makes me sick
When he is not dancing
He looks just like stick
Now he doesn’t have any arms or legs
You cannot see his ears
And while we are not looking
He’s stealing all of our beerAnd then sneak snake goes dancing
Wiggling and a-hissing
Sneaky snake goes dancing
A-giggling and a-kissing
I don’t like old sneaky snake
He laughs too much you see
When he goes wiggling through the grass
It tickles his underneath
So this is what the label on the bottle should look like, or would look like if I could get it to print correctly:
I’m definitely not a graphic designer, but I do like the picture part. The picture of the snake is from about 10 years ago, when I found a snake in Shorty and Doris’ flower bed. I photoshopped it up a bit though.
I might not explain everything about this under normal circumstances, but my nearly professional labeler Elizabeth is concerned that people might think it is name after the “I’m a Snake” guy of YouTube fame. It definitely is not. So don’t even try thinking that!
I have a few bottles of Batch 001 left. I’ve earmarked a few for December Movie Night. And the rest, well they might go to Elizabeth’s progeny. They apparently are big fans of Sneaky Snake Root Beer!
I’m going to continue to experiment with the recipe. Try different brands of extract. Try Glenn’s original recipe. I want to try mixing in some vanilla at some point too. I definitely need to figure out a way to capture more carbonation. I’m not sure how to do that yet, but I have some theories. Batch 001 will be followed by Batch 002 and 003 and so on and so forth more hopefully.
At the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011 I seem to have lost a ton of pictures. I’m grouping all the pictures that are in the folder 01JANUARY2011 together for this post:
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:
I’m not sure what next week’s walk down memory lane will cover. My files from 2011 are a complete mess. Just a complete mess.
On Tuesday when I opened up the Twitters looking for any new Iowa State or Big 12 expansion news, I saw this post from Nick Bassett that made me smile so big:
For those of you that don’t follow sports, College GameDay is a pregame show on ESPN on Saturday mornings for college football. It is a huge deal when they come to your town and they are in Ames for Iowa State’s game this Saturday. It is awesome that they are interviewing Nick.
If you don’t know Nick, you are missing out. He did Speech stuff with Logan in high school and Elainie used to go out to his place for their bonfires. He is a great guy that sits a section from me at the Iowa State games. The Des Moines Register recently ran a story on him. You can read it by clicking on the link below:
I will share just a small chunk of the story:
Bassett was given about an hour to mull over the biggest decision of his life: Whether to amputate his legs or keep them and risk further infections. Both of Bassett’s legs had sores caused by poor circulation. If Bassett opted against amputation, he’d have to go through skin grafts and operations. After discussing the options, his doctor left the room and told him he’d be back in an hour.
Bassett didn’t need that long.
Bassett called his parents and told them to come to the hospital. He was going to have his legs amputated. His doctor scheduled an operation to remove them just above the knee for later in the week.
After making the decision, Bassett logged on his Twitter account and announced it, along with a plan for the future to followers.
He wrote that there was “no clear line on recovery but my goal is to be healthy enough to watch” Campbell and the Iowa State football team at Jack Trice Stadium this fall.
He ended it with this: “Two words keep racing through my mind…”I Will.”
Once again, here is the picture I took of Nick at the game on Saturday:
College GameDay is on ESPN from 8 AM to 11 AM, in case you want to watch.
This Saturday from 8-12 we are going to have the final sale at my Mom’s house. There is still lots of glassware and collectibles for sale. A few tools. Many decorations. Maybe some furniture. Some other stuff will be added this week as well I’m sure. The address is 111 South Benton Street. The sale is in the garage and in the garage only. The garage is on the alley. The alley is a dead end, so don’t come down the alley and try to park. I’ll let you know if any of the details change.
Here is another collection of pictures of flowers from my Mom’s yard. These pictures were taken on May 16, 2021.
Many more flower pictures to share. Many more!
Well over a year ago my Mom paid for a brick to honor her Dad for his military service that was to be placed around the Boone County Freedom Rock. I believe that she ended up splitting that cost with her brothers and sisters. Then she purchased a brick to honor Elainie. It took well over a year and she never got to see the bricks, but they are finally in place. Well they are sorta in place:
If you look at the brick that honors Elainie’s military service, you will notice that they misspelled her name. This is supposedly going to be fixed and replaced with a brick that spells her name correctly. Sooner rather than later, so I guess we will wait and see.
Here are pictures of some of the flowers I planted at Mom’s house on Mother’s Day. These pictures were taken on May 9, 2021.
The last two are of a squirrel that build a nest in the tree that straddles the property line with her property and the neighbors to the south.
Yesterday I completed yet another successful month of THE SELFIE PROJECT. I was surprised how packed a month it was. When I looked back at some of the images, I thought, “that happened in August? It feels like such a long time ago!”
Here are my favorites from August:
August 3, 2021
August 4, 2021
August 5, 2021
August 7, 2021
August 8, 2021
August 11, 2021
August 12, 2021
August 13, 2021
August 15, 2021
August 17, 2021
August 19, 2021
August 22, 2021
August 24, 2021
August 27, 2021
August 28, 2021
August 29, 2021
August 31, 2021
There can only be one Selfie per day, but I’ve decided to start sharing some alternate selfies from the month, that just didn’t make the cut:
If you want to peruse all the THE SELFIE PROJECT images, click on the link below:
Hopefully September is another successful month!
It seems like a good time to review my first time as the Chair of the Pufferbilly Days Photo Contest. I don’t know I can say it was an extreme success, but enough of a success to build on. Participation was way down this year, but I think that was to be expected as participation seems to be down across the board and there were lots of things working against the Photo Contest.
I was able to fix a few of the things that have bothered me about the Pufferbilly Days Photo Contest in the past:
#1. The pictures were up for display on time, in fact, a day early.
#2. All the pictures were labelled with the name of the photographer, what class they were in, and the name of image.
#3. There was a display that named the winners that you could easily look at to see who placed in each class.
#4. Some small organizational things here and there, like putting stickers on the back of the entries, having a system for dividing and then combining the entries by photographer, and putting all the entries into bags with the judging forms, so they are easy to pick up.
There are plenty of changes I want to make next year, but I’ll get into that at the end.
I need to thank everybody that helped with the contest this year:
+ Michelle – Thanks for helping with adjusting the entry form and saved the life of at least one tree.
+ Kim – Thanks for the use of your Dymo for printing labels and the box.
+ Vest – Thanks for help with working with the OTHER Dymo.
+ Teresa – Thanks for all the help with the clerical/organizational side and creating the awards sign.
+ Carla – Thanks for all the help with the clerical/organization side, including labeling the ribbons.
+ Logan – Thanks for being a judge and smoking the meat for supper on the night of the judging.
+ Nathanial – Thanks for being a judge and bringing the sides for supper on the night of judging.
+ Lisa – Thanks for being a judge and bringing some experience and wisdom to this process.
+ Elainie – Thanks for being inside the window and setting up and taking down the display.
+ Kio – Thanks for getting me this gig and being the outside window helper when setting up the display.
+ Jesse – Thanks for putting up the banner and writing the thank you notes with your good penmanship. Also for distributing the flyers.
+ Megan – Thanks for your brilliant sidewalk chalk art.
+ Jorge – Thanks for the LaserJet printer that we used to print the labels.
+ The Staff of KWBG – For being supper supportive and always going the extra mile.
+ Boone First United Methodist Church – For providing a place to judge the images with an elevator.
I’m sure I’m forgetting somebody that helped during the process. This is not an intentional error. I thank whomever I forgot.
Here are some pictures from the judging process:
We did the judging in Fellowship Hall at the Boone First United Methodist Church. I selected three judges because I didn’t want ties (although that was still a possibility) and I want a diversity of opinions and photographic skills.
The judges were:
Logan Kahler – Runs his own photography business. Former editor of the Boone News-Republican. Does wedding and event photography. Also does quite a bit of real estate photography.
Nathanial Brown – Proprietor of Nathanial Brown Productions. The leading force in Abandoned Iowa Photography and does a town of concert and event photography. Plus all sorts of photography for musicians in general.
Lisa Person – Half of Person Photography with her husband Bob. One of the best photographers I’ve ever known and it was particularly meaningful to me on a personal level to have her as part of the team for my first go as chair of this event. Their family and my family have always been intertwined in the world of photography. They did Senior Pictures for me and my sisters. They did the photography for all of our weddings. My Dad took a photography class (probably several) from Bob.
The story I’ve always heard about how Bob and my Dad met goes back to a 4-H display at the Boone County Fair. One of my sisters had entered a picture and Bob was a judge. Bob had given one of the pictures not a very good score. My Dad (who was over 6 foot and had a full manly beard) approached Bob who is more like 5 foot 6 (maybe) about why he gave this picture such a low score. (The picture used a technique called “soft focus”, but Bob considered that to just be out of focus.) Bob was terrified (or at least scared and intimidated) because he thought he had this big guy (that could surely squash him) pissed at him for giving his daughter’s picture low marks. But he soon found out that my Dad was only looking for information. Pointers. Advice. From that one conversation, they soon became great friends.
While Lisa was not a sentimental pick by any stretch of the imagination, it was very sentimental for me to have her in the room.
I got Megan Osborn to put down some sidewalk chalk art in front of the Photo Contest display to try to draw some more attention to it.
Here are some pictures of Megan:
Unfortunately, it rained that very night and washed most of it away. But then Jennifer from KWBG and her daughter traced over it and brought it back to life. Then it rained again. So the sidewalk chalk art didn’t draw people in, but now I know how to get it to rain.
Here are picture of the photo display being put up and taken down:
Here are some statistics from the Pufferbilly Days Photo Contest:
+ 24 total entries
+ 20 Adult entries
+ 4 Youth entries
+ 5 Photoshop Enhanced (Adult) entries
+ 3 Hidden Treasures of Boone County (Adult) entries
+ 1 Photojournalism (Adult) entry
+ 11 Nature (Adult) entry
+ 5 Adult photographers
+ 2 Youth photographers
The Award Winners:
Adult – Hidden Treasures of Boone County
1. John Roberts – Last Train of the Season
2. John Roberts – Slowly Sinking
3. Tyler Alber – Boone County IA Sunset
Adult – Nature
1. Angie DeWaard – Golden Glow of Summer
2. Ava Stevens – Floral Summer Sun of My Heart
3. Angie DeWaard – Dragonfire
Adult – Photoshop Enhanced
1. Beatrice Upah – Are those donkeys?
2. Beatrice Upah – Rest Time
3. Beatrice Upah – Middle of Nowhere
Adult – Photojournalism
1. Angie DeWaard – Pandemic Chicken
Youth – Hidden Treasures of Boone County
1. Kayelee Burns – train turn about
Youth – Photojournalism
1. Daphne Harris – Fun in the Park
Youth – Photoshop Enhanced
1. Daphne Harris – Reflextion of Pinkie Pie
2. Kayelee Burns – My dog at ledges
My two main concerns for next year are that I need to figure out a way to get participation up. The other thing I need to come up with is a plan for getting the window display cooled. It gets extremely hot in that display and that causes many of the pictures to curl and I swear almost melt. I have a few ideas in mind for this problem. One of them includes replacing a window (or windows) with peg board. If anybody comes across some free or very cheap peg board that I can cut down… well I’m your huckleberry.
I’m also researching air conditioner options.
Here is a list of ideas I may bring to the 2022 Pufferbilly Days Photo Contest. Not all ideas are mine, but all of them are being considered.
+ Change the classes. In particular, I’m not a fan of the Photoshop Enhanced and Photojournalism category. I’m not sure what the new classes would be, but I’ve received more than one suggestion that there should be a railroad class for a festival that celebrates railroad heritage.
+ Move the deadline back to the Friday before Pufferbilly Days.
+ Add a Best in Show winner.
+ Customized Ribbons.
+ A People’s Choice Winner where people can vote online for their favorite. (This will take some work.)
+ Get the rules and entry form out as soon as possible. Get the flyer out as soon as possible. I plan on sending a reminder postcard out to all of this year’s entries when the Chamber is ready to start taking in entries.
+ Split the age divisions into Youth, Teen, and Adult. Get rid of classes for Youth. One of the Youth entries I got simply listed their class as “Photo”. I made the command decision on what category to enter it into. I don’t think kids should get wrapped up in categories. The important thing is just that they take pictures.
+ I also want to get somebody with actual graphic design skills to design the flyer next year. Also, somebody with artistic skills to design a logo for the contest. I already have an idea of what I want it to look like.
+ I also want to tweak the rules. I don’t know that I will require foam board, but it might be strongly encouraged. Also dry mounting. I’m not joking when I say that some of the photos practically melted in there. I think I will also include some tips for entering photo contests. That sounds arrogant, because I definitely don’t want to claim that I have anything figured out on that front, but little things like don’t enter more than one picture that looks similar or has the same subject. Those are just going to compete against each other in the judges’ eyes and a picture of a different subject will scoot right by it and earn a ribbon.
Those are just the ideas off the top of my head. I know that there are more percolating around my head and heads of others. But I have plenty of time to work on it.
This is your reminder that this week’s THE WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE theme is MOVEMENT:
MOVEMENT! What a great theme! But what is a MOVEMENT photo? Simply put, a MOVEMENT photo is a picture of something that is in motion. There are two different ways to capture movement. Use a quick shutter speed to freeze movement. Use a longer shutter speed to blur motion.
And if you can’t control shutter speed, don’t worry about it too much. Just get a picture of something in motion and the photography gods will take care of the rest.
Happy photo harvesting!
Here is the final collection of pictures from the Stenslands 2020 family photo shoot:
These were the last pictures from 2020 that I had yet to share. I might start taking Sundays back off from “An Artist’s Notebook”, but I will need to take a look at where I stand with the backlog before making any kind of rash decisions.
There were large collections of images in the folders 2010-09-20, 2010-09-21, or 2010-09-27 so I combined them into one post. These include pictures of an Iowa State-Kansas State football game, pictures taken shortly after Evie was born, and pictures of Elainie playing football.
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 post will involve a picture I really wish I remember why I took it. Plus pictures of Foster Q. Bunny.
