Change of Pace

Perhaps it's that I'm getting older or that I'm in a happy, stable relationship or that is wet and chilly outside, but I'm actually feeling pretty good about spending my Saturday night in the city holed up in my Aunt's apartment eating bing cherries and playing with photoshop. After all, I've spent the past few days catching up with friends, seeing art, running in Central Park, taking photographs of interesting people and even networking with a documentary filmmaker who works with a humanitarian organization in Afghanistan.

My only regret is that the audio recorder I just bought didn't come until after I'd left Columbia, so I could collect sound to build a story about an affable undercover cop who has befriended a community of elderly Latino domino players, winning their trust and adopting them as a collection of surrogate "Abuelos."

One of the challenging facets of my staff photographer experience thus far is the process of learning how to “enterprise” feature photos. We’re meant to put together a list each week of our ideas for freestanding photographs; either little feature photo stories, slice of life images or simply pretty or interesting pictorial images.

The stereotype of these kinds of pictures is the cute puppy/adorable child genre (i.e. this photo for Sunday’s paper), but the goal is to keep our eyes open for potential interesting scenes that might work for good feature photos in better light or in different situations with more (or fewer) people in them. Tougher than it sounds, I’m finding.

Once I get back from New York next week, my plan is to invest in a good map of Boone County so I can start really exploring the smaller byways around Columbia in hopes of finding some better grist for the photo mill. That and to finish my profile of a local taxi cab owning couple—I only need one more photo!

The sinus infection has dragged on for a couple of weeks, so I'm just now thinking about starting to run again, but it's been a much more productive summer in terms of photography...my first cover story ran today. Shooting for the newspaper is fun, but challenging in that the slow pace of work in the summer requires a lot more of what they call "enterprise" work AKA, get off your butt and find something interesting to shoot. When we're not on assignment or wandering around town looking for ideas, our little photo gang likes to get together to play Adventure Club, which involves wandering around town and taking pictures of each other!

I suppose it's a little vain of us, but what are a bunch of cute photo girls (our token male couldn't make it that day) to do when faced with a big river and gorgeous magic hour light?

It's so damn easy to come up with reasons not to get out there for a run. It's too humid, I didn't get enough sleep, I'm sore from the bike ride, I need to make breakfast for the kids...and then Tuesday morning it was, It's already too hot out and my tummy hurt last night so I didn't sleep well. I was so proud of myself though...I got up and trudged through six sweaty miles even though I didn't feel like it.

In hindsight, it seems clear that I was already getting sick at that point and the extra hour of sleep might have done me some good, but it's too late to worry about that now. My head hurts and my throat hurts and my skin hurts when the molecules of air collide with it and when I'm not too hot, I'm shivering and too cold and I feel exhausted if I stand up for longer than five minutes.

This made for a less than industrious photographer as I tackled my second day of staff at the Missourian. It's not that I slacked exactly, but I didn't do much more than was absolutely required of me.

My first subject, a flip-flop wearing undergrad, wasn't even home when I showed up to photograph her. Luckily I was able to show up early for my next assignment, a podiatrist who says that flip-flops are terrible for you. It actually worked out well, since by arriving early I was able to shoot the good doctor talking to a flip-flop wearing patient and the original appointment time would have just given me a straight up environmental portrait. Podiatrist Dr. Scott Foster explains to patient Barry Hibdon what he should expect during his recovery from foot surgery in his Columbia, Mo. office, June 3, 3009. Hibdon frequently wears flip-flops, though the calcification on the bone of his big toe is an unrelated condition.

I did get to shoot the Ben Folds concert in town, which helped a little with my homesickness for the city since it's been ages since I've seen a real rock show. Specifically, someone I've actually heard of and like.

I've also been casing out some other ideas for photos outside of what gets assigned to me during my shifts. I met a jewelry artist at the Orr Street Studios today that seemed like he might have some good stories to tell as well as the obvious visual interest of his craft. I'm also working on tracking down an arrowhead maker (aka, a flintknapper) in a town about half an hour north of here (very controversial stuff in the archeological community, I assure you) and getting in touch with a bat rehabilitator right here in Columbia.

A week after the relief of finishing up the semester...it's time to start up again. At least the summer semester should be a bit more relaxed what with only having my staff photography class. I'm hoping to use the free time to teach myself Flash and Dreamweaver and practice a bit more with audio slideshows. If I really get my act together, maybe I can even start working on the research component of my master's project. Other than that though, I should be able to steal more time away in St. Louis to hang out with Jack and the little people.

Speaking of which, I took my new camera out for its first spin at a two game suburban little league baseball series. The players crack me up with how manly their little 10-year-old bodies look once they're all uniformed up and striking big-league poses.

While it was awesome that Clay got a hit on his very first swing, this would have been a nice opportunity to run up a full count to take advantage of that gorgeous nuclear sky.

My wrenched ankle recovered nicely after a week of icing and rest, so the next batch of pics will be from last weekend's biking expedition. It was great fun, but physically harder than I'd expected it to be. Like the triathlon, this was yet another reminder of how naturally running comes to me. I fancy myself as this badass endurance athlete, but when I try to apply myself to a new sport I sure come back down to earth quickly. It definitely keeps me humble.

I was so excited to finish the semester and finally get back into the running routine and the weather is almost offensively perfect right now for just that, but then I had to go and twist my ankle while trampolining with the kids at SkyZone (basically a warehouse-sized trampoline complex). It was a great workout right up until the moment where I landed just a little funny and had to sit down for a moment to wait out the pain. I assured the attendant that I was fine, but later that night it became clear that it really wasn't. I'm still hopeful that I'll be able to do a bike trip next weekend, but for the moment, running on this swollen gimpy ankle is definitely out of the question.

Oh well, at least the semester is still over with. My final project team turned in our magnum opus last Wednesday. It's got its flaws, but I really don't think its half bad for a first try at multimedia. (Not counting my marathon video from last Spring)

In hindsight, I wish it had more of a storyline to it and it probably runs at a little bit too fast of a pace, but it was fun to put together and I definitely plan to keep working on my audio-visual skills. Assuming my ankle cooperates, I'd like to try and make another little multimedia presentation about the Pedaler's Jamboree next weekend.

Probably just as well though, since I did have a bit of a wardrobe malfunction.

It's the brutal end of the semester here. Rough stuff.

Even as dissipated an athlete as I am these days, running three miles should be akin to blinking for me. But it ain't no joke getting the legs to function properly after a quarter mile of swimming and 14 miles of hilly biking. My legs felt like lead weights and I couldn't suck down a deep breath to save my life. This probably sounds insincere as I blush modestly and admit that my time for the run was the fastest of any chick in her thirties, but as far as the first two legs of the triathlon go, I've got me a LOT of work to do.

All in all though, I liked it. It was fun, I didn't embarrass myself and it was a treat to be competing with Jack since I can't even tell you the last time he and I did a race together. He started about 10 seconds before me in the swim and I didn't see him again until well into the run when I finished about the same amount of time behind him. We are very evenly matched indeed.

I think I probably will try a few more of these, since it forces me to be more well rounded in my training and the two non-running sports are SO much easier on the body. Plus, I'm likely to see a lot more improvement in them since I'm just starting out.

The hyper-technicality of the sport is kind of a big turnoff, but it's not like I have the means to be running out to buy a fancy, schmancy new bike anyway. I set my 16-year-old Specialized Transition next to a new one at the race and it's pretty striking to see how different the two vehicles are structurally.

As far as the raw stats go...I finished 8th out of 28 35-39 yr-old women. I did the 800m swim in 11:22 (that includes getting out of the pool and running quite a far piece to the transition area outside and across a field), 1:56 first transition, 50:46 for the 14-mile bike, 1:04 second transition and 21:02 for the three mile run.

Oh, I'm not really a professional at it, I'm more of an amateur crastinator. Now my roomie...she's someone I can learn from. Tony Hawk 3 AND 4 until 4a.m. That's impressive. I never really got beyond Tetris and Bejeweled and I am staying far, FAR away from those tar pits until my 27 pages of research paper are done with.

Of course that doesn't mean I can't blog, change my laptop wall paper, check Facebook and get sidelined by interesting academic articles that don't have even a peripheral relationship to my research. I keep thinking I should go for a run or a swim, but in this instance that would probably just qualify as more procrastination. I've logged a measly three miles so far this week on the roads, but since the triathlon is Sunday, I'm just saying this is all taper. Hopefully I can be done with my first paper by the time Jack gets here tomorrow afternoon and the race will count as a healthy break before I plunge back into academic hell.

In other news this week, the basement of my apartment (where my bedroom is) flooded Wednesday night, but my poor housemate got the brunt of the damage since it was her window well that filled up. It was actually quite exciting to jump down into three feet of muddy water and old leaves to try and bail it out, but ultimately it was a friendly crew of firefighters that showed up at 1:30 in the morning to help us clear the drain and stem the flood. Welcome to Missouri.

Tuesday night I drove down to Lake of the Ozarks (or actually about 20 miles south of there) to photograph some fabulous castle ruins that incongruously exist on the edge of a cliff in Ha Ha Tonka State Park. The assignment required using strobe or flashlights to create light in an otherwise pitch-black situation, a technique that can result in some fantastically funky results. In this case, we lit both the foreground And that tower half a mile away in the distance. Impressed?

There was a lot of fine-tuning we would have liked to do to this image since the "ghost" looks a bit too corporeal, but we were already imposing on the generous patience of the park superintendent, so it was necessary to wrap up our shoot and head on home. This picture was swiped from the site of team member Joel Kowsky and my other two partners in crime were Chris Dunn and Ivy Ashe.

For the non-Mizzou visitors, it's worth checking out the other students' results here, here, here and (eventually) here. Fun, fun stuff.

Oh, and back to the original subject of the post, if you're doing the same thing right now, this is kind of cute: