January 2010 Snow
Friday afternoon, we encountered a winter storm that loaded us up with a nice amount of snow. It's been interesting reading all my friends posts on Facebook about the snow during the last 24 hours. Forecasts get blown out of proportion rather quickly and there are runs on the grocery stores for milk and bread at the first whispers of snow by the television meteorologists. People in the south are terrified of the prospects of getting snowed in. We rarely get more than 10" of snow, and snowfalls that deep are rare as well. This snow didn't amount to that much. Facebook friend reports in my immediate area reached a whopping 12". I got about 6 or 7 inches in my yard, if even that much. I definitely enjoyed the day though. I went to a friend's house this morning and participated in his homebrewing session and watched some fun sledding in his yard, which is on a very steep slope!
Raptors
I had an interesting assignment this afternoon. I went to Geitner Park to photograph the release of a rehabilitated bald eagle. This event was held by the Carolina Raptor Center and the Catawba Science Center. I didn't catch any really great photos of the bald eagle though. It was a rather quick process. The eagle was wrapped up. When it was unwrapped, it was released very quickly. The vantage point I chose for the eagle release turned out to be a poor one, so I don't have any great photos of that, but I turned in what I had and decided to shoot some 'portraits' for myself of the other birds they had on display at the event. The above bird is a red-tailed hawk that is a permanent resident of the Carolina Raptor Center, and the photo below is a barred owl from the same source.
Baseball Season?
Today is January 20th, 2010. It got up to 65° outside this afternoon and the weather was relatively nice. Tonight, I attended the annual Hickory Crawdads Hot Stove Banquet where Jon Daniels, the General Manager of the Texas Rangers, gave the key note address (pictured above). I got to see a lot of the folks from L.P. Frans Stadium... team owners... staff... and quite a few of the regular fans and season ticket holders at the park. It was great! The only problem is that baseball season is still about 3 months away.
The Crawdads schedule this season, in my opinion, is about as bad as it gets as far as season schedules are concerned. I know these rotations happen occasionally, but we start the season and end the season with 8-game road trips. We are also on the road on the Fourth of July.
I think I'm gonna change my seats this season and move from behind the third base dugout to a new location... I'll let you know how that goes. I need to stop by the stadium one day next week :)
The Amazon Kindle
I have wanted an Amazon Kindle since they were first put on the market. Unfortunately when they first came out at $499, there was no way I could make that kind of financial sacrifice to add another gadget to my collection. Over time, the new version 2 of the kindle came out and the price dropped from $499 to $359 to $299 to $259. Thanks to the Great Tondini, I found one under the Christmas tree this year...
During my past three years or so back in school, I had to get out of my standard reading routine in order to read textbooks instead of novels. Now that I'm finished with school, I am moving back into my standard reading routine. Since Christmas day, I have read two new novels and part of a third on the Kindle, and I have already formed some serious opinions on the device that I just wanted to share. I do not have experience with the Sony Reader or the Barnes and Noble Nook, but my thoughts here are rather independent of the actual device. My feelings would generally apply equally to either of the other devices.
I guess we can start with the things I really like about the Amazon Kindle. The size of the Kindle is roughly equivalent to most books at 8" x 5.3". It's also thin at .36" and easy to hold. It's fairly easy to navigate and the menus are self explanatory for the most part. The Kindle has enough storage capability to hold approximately 1500 books, give or take. That's probably more books than I'll read between now and the time this device becomes obsolete. Books for the Kindle are inexpensive. Choices from the best-sellers list can be purchased for $10 or less and they are wirelessly delivered to the device. Some books are less expensive than $10 and there is a ton of free material available as well. Once a book is purchased, it becomes part of your Kindle library on Amazon.com. If your Kindle ever takes a swim or decides to stay behind on a park bench, your library will still be intact once you replace the device. The battery life on the Kindle is very good. I basically read each novel that I have finished so far on a single charge of the device. That mileage will obviously vary from person to person, but I am impressed with that. The Kindle is designed to be energy efficient. You can increase the battery life by turning off the wireless connectivity and only turning it back on when you need it for something such as downloading new content or receiving Kindle automatic software updates. When it comes time to charge the Kindle, you simply connect it to its USB charging cable that either plugs into a standard power outlet or a PC USB port. Reading on the Kindle is a lot easier than I thought it might be. The display is not like a standard LCD. It's not back-lit, so you do need adequate light for reading when using this device. The screen is quite easy to read in bright light and outdoors as well. The screen is 6" diagonally, and you may adjust the font from too tiny to I'm blind sizes. The Kindle automatically remembers where you stop reading and allows you to resume from that point at any time. You can also create specific bookmarked points and return to those at your leisure. If the book you are reading supports it, you can navigate from chapter to chapter by using the joystick, but not all books support this as I will mention in my dislikes section of this review. If you find a passage you would like to save in a book or other text, you can highlight the selection and it will be saved in your highlights section that can be reviewed or edited via a USB connection to your PC. One of my favorite features on the Kindle is the integrated dictionary. If I stumble across a word I don't recognize, I can move the cursor to that word and get a definition.
Thats a lot of stuff I like... It feels kind of strange because it's more of a feature list of the device. There are more features, bells, and whistles, but these are the items I'm thinking about currently as reasons I like the Amazon Kindle. There are some things I don't like about the Kindle and other similar devices on the market.
If I leave my Kindle sitting on a park bench or on a table in the local coffee shop, I'm out of an expensive toy. If I left a book behind, it wouldn't sting as much. That's not likely to happen, but it could. I have left books behind before. It doesn't feel like a book. It's obviously not a book, but there is a bit of a mental hurdle involved in switching from a physical book to a Kindle. I don't think it's an insurmountable hurdle though. If the battery in a Kindle dies, you can't read until you get charged back up. I have never had to worry about charging a book before! When I finish reading a book on the Kindle, I can't loan it to a friend. Likewise, I can't borrow a book that another friend has finished on his or her Kindle. This little problem of sharing books may be addressed at some point, but in a best case scenario, you would only be able to share with other Kindle owners. Navigating within Kindle books can be a bit tedious if you want to do certain things. Some books will let you move easily from chapter to chapter while others will not. I'm not sure if it's a simple formatting issue for the book or what, but it's annoying sometimes. Kindle books do not use standard page numbers. They use a concept called locations. The size of a page on the kindle varies based on what font size you have selected, so the page number concept doesn't work so solidly on an electronic book. You can navigate directly to a location but I'm not sure exactly how a location is defined yet. The last novel I read had approximately 5000 locations to choose from. In the paper version, there were about 270 pages, so I'm not sure what the correlation is. At any rate, it's not like flipping through paper pages. The Kindle does have a keyboard, so making notes in the margin of the electronic book sort of possible, but not in the traditional sense. The Kindle is a lot more fragile than a regular book. You have to be careful about tossing it in your backpack or laptop bag and hauling it around. It' can't take the beating that a regular book might get in normal transit. If you are a fan of watching your library of books grow on shelves, you can kiss that aspect of being an avid reader goodbye.
There are a lot of trade-offs I suppose. It will be fun to watch this technology evolve...
The Bears and the New Year
My first photo assignment of the new year and decade was a couple basketball games at Lenoir-Rhyne University as the men and women hosted the Pioneers of Tusculum College. There was a rather decent crowd at tonight's game considering the fact that the students are still on Christmas break.
I don't really have any photography objectives for the new year, even though I wish I did. I have seriously fallen off the wagon when it comes to my art photography, and I really have no excuse for it. I'm finished with school and I'm only working part time so I really should be digging back into the interests that got me started in this hobby to begin with. I think I need to set some goals...
As always, I have my 1000 Faces project. I only added 40 faces to this collection in 2009. I need to work on increasing that if I ever hope to finish the project. I got some new software that I have been wanting for Christmas. SoundSlides Plus is a great tool for photo slide shows and storytelling, so I intend to play with that some in the coming months... I think I might pursue the storytelling avenue just a bit in the near future if I can come up with a couple good project ideas...
A Snow Day
It's been snowing all day here and supposed to keep snowing into tomorrow sometime. I'm not sure how much we will get, but we had about 6 inches or so by 7:30pm. I decided not to venture out in MY car because none of the roads in my neighborhood or surrounding areas had been cleaned at all. This little car just isn't cut out for that, but hopefully by tomorrow I'll be able to get out without much worry. My friend Rob picked me up and we went to the Olde Hickory Tap Room for a couple hours to hang out and have a few cold beers...
The beer and company is always good here... and it's always nice and warm...
A Close Game
I went down to Bandys tonight to cover a basketball game between the Lady Trojans and the Lady Red Devils of Newton-Conover High school. This was definitely one of the better high school games I have seen in a while. The Lady Trojans battled back from a hefty first period deficit to take the lead, but ultimately couldn't hold on in the end.
I'm curious to see how a lot of things pan out this year in girls' prep basketball. The all-powerful Hickory Lady Tornadoes aren't what they used to be, and some of the local teams are chomping at the bit to get a shot at them this year. The Lady Red Devils of Newton-Conover lost to the Lady Tornadoes by a mere two points last week... There will be some great competition in this year's Holiday Classic. Holiday Classic play stars on Monday, December 28 and ends on Wednesday, December 30.
Wrestling Season
Here we go again with another installment of the constant bichin' from me about having to photograph wrestling. In my area, wrestling gets almost the same amount of coverage as basketball. Or at least it has in past seasons, because I got stuck with shooting most of it. Hopefully this year will see some balance in how much basketball vs wrestling I photograph each week since we have one new photo stringer and a second one on the way. Since I'm not a fan of individual sports, I just have a hard time getting into wrestling personally. You can call wrestling a team sport all you want, but until they put more than two kids on the mat at a time and let the last man standing get the win, its an individual sport.
The above photo is a sample of what I can get at a couple of the schools around here. The wrestling powers that be want to create 'mood' and 'atmosphere' for the fan base (parents and girlfriends) that attend these events. That mood and atmosphere is created by turning off all the lights in the gym except for a single merc vapor directly above the center of the mat. I can make some nice high contrast photos in that environment, but none that could possibly be used in the newspaper, so I have to pop my flash and flatten out any potentially interesting photographs and have no chance at excellence in natural lighting.
Hoops!
It's always a nice feeling when the sports seasons change. I don't dislike any of the sports I shoot... except for one or two... :) It just feels good to have a change of pace. Today, I got to shift gears just a little and shoot my first basketball game of the season. Oh.. and I forgot to mention that it was pouring down rain. Football season isn't over for me yet though. We'll see how far our local teams go in the state playoffs...
Rain Again and Again
I really do enjoy football season, but this season has been absolutely disastrous from a photographer's standpoint. Today wrapped up the first 11 weeks of the season of local high school and college football. I'm absolutely ready for this season to END. We have had so much rain on Friday nights this year. I'm actually sick of it. Last night I was sorta lucky. It rained before the high school game started but quit right at game time. Today, however, I got dumped on during Lenoir-Rhyne University's last home game of the season.
I'm finished with LRU for the season, but next Friday is the last week of the local high school conferences regular play. The following week begins state playoffs. Normally we have teams go up until about Thanksgiving, which is three rounds into the tournament, so the end is actually in sight. With any luck, I'll have less than 4 more weeks of football. We have several local teams that look fairly strong within the conference, so we'll just have to see how they fare in the state...
