Snow Day!

Snow Fun

Nate Foote, 8, front, and Max Nicholson, 9, sled down a hill beside Bishop Road on Saturday. Below: Elizabeth Weinstein tries to avoid hitting the family dog Prince Louis while sledding Saturday on a hill along Bishop Road. Bottom: an ATV rider turns doughnuts in the snow.

Watch that dog!

Snow doughnuts

Golf Blogger

Golf blogger

This is Trevor. He wants you to read his new golf blog From Tee to Green.

Smoking Ban

Smoking Ban
Rick Rackley smokes Jan. 20 outside Mama's Pizza & Italian Restaurant on Benvenue Road. Rackley stated the smoking ban hasn't stopped him and his family from visiting the restaurant on each week.

Yurtfolk

Yurtfolk
LuAnne Harley and her son Owen Kruschwitz, 5, lead a group in folk dances Tuesday at Braswell Memorial Library. The two are part of a family, calling themselves Yurtfolk, who travel from library to library talking about nomadic cultures.

Moving the Wall

Moving the wall

Surrounded in dust, Mike Jacobs with E.L Jacobs Masonry, inc. uses a grinder to remove mortar from bricks Monday during a project to demolish a section of the serpentine wall in front of N.C. Wesleyan College to make way for the new Northern Connector rout.

Jacobs, who's father worked on the construction of the original wall, stated that the bricks will be reused in the construction of a new section of wall alongside the Northern Connector.

The new section will be of equal or greater length than the original, preserving the wall's touted record as the longest Jeffersonian serpentine wall in the world.

Scarlet Checkmark

Scarlet Checkmark

A photo illustration for a story on the difficulties people attempting to recover from a criminal past can face when looking for work in a difficult job market.

Polaroid New Years

Polaroid lights 7

With no ill New Years Eve party to go to, I decided to make my own--with my Polaroid!

...and my Christmas tree.

I recently acquired a Polaroid Countdown M80 land camera, and it's popped the cork on all sorts of vintage instant print fun. A precission instrument it is not, but with a little imagination, serendipity and Polaroid magic cool things can happen.

Exposure control is limited to a little 'lighter / darker' dial on the lens, but in low light (a room with only a Cristmas tree on qualifies) the shutter speeds get pretty long.

And because this is a pack film camera where you pull out the film manually -- as opposed to the 600 type of Polaroid that growls and spits the thing out automatically -- you can easily do multiple exposures.

You can keep cocking the shutter and firing frames off to your heart's content before yanking the tab--how cool is that! You just keep cocking the shutter and firing away until you see fit to yank the tab and see what you got.

In all the excitement I kind of lost track of excttly how many exposures I made on each frame. I'd say some of these pics might have as many as 10-20 exposures. I turned out the lights and made exposures of my Christmas tree with a variety of techniques.

For some exposures I held the camera steady, for others I swirled it, twirled it, and swung it to make light trails. For some I held the camera right in front of a bulb and pulled it away quickly with the shutter open.

Some shots were in sharp focus while others were thrown completely out to get some nice big colorful blobs (bokeh if you're one of those people that uses the term).

I did some pictures with my 'real' camera too, but you can't get pictures like this with a digital camera. Sure, you can use Photoshop to make a composite from multiple exposures, but without the serendipitous magic of the instant print it just wouldn't be the same.

So long story short; I stayed up way past my bedtime playing around with this fun stuff on new years. Hope you like it!

Polaroid lights 6

Polaroid lights 5

Polaroid lights 3

If you like this, you might also enjoy this post and this post.
See more cool stuff on my Flickr.

Best of 09': Volleyball

N.C. Wesleyan Volleyball

I'm enjoying the calm before the storm of winter sports kicks into full swing, and looking back on some of my work from the fall. Here, for your viewing pleasure, is the best of my volleyball pictures from this past season. Click on the pics for details.

Dig!

Southern Nash Volleyball

VB Playoffs

VB Playoffs

VB Playoffs

VB Playoffs