greenvillesky

 Reid's Orchard. Owensboro, Ky.

Journey to Burning Man

My friend Mick Jeffries from Kentucky and his brother Chris have set out on an arduous, cross-country journey in an Airstream loaded with cases of Ale-8 One soft drinks, a ukulele and an assortment of laptops and techno gear for a trip of a lifetime.  They are going to be a part of Burning Man 2009.  I will just let you click on that link because it would take this whole page to describe what Burning Man is,  exactly.  Burning Man takes place in Black Rock City, Nevada.  At any rate,  they have just begun the trip and found themselves in Missouri after driving most of the night from Owensboro, Ky.  I will be following them on the journey and I thought I'd pass it along to you.  Mick is Tweeting (see @mrtoastey feed at right) and Facebooking and blogging along the way and has already hit his first snag.  You can follow his blog,  Mingle Freely,  to keep up. This should be a great adventure.  I am jealous.

The bigger picture

A couple of years ago the photography staff at the newspaper I work for, The Daily Reflector, took it upon ourselves to document the condition of an old and historical tobacco factory in our city; The Imperial Tobacco Factory. We set about shooting fine art type images and exhibited them for a month in a local coffee house in Greenville. In April the building burned and all that is left is a shell that will soon be demolished.

In the near future at the paper we are also preparing to write a series of stories on the homeless in our city.

These two stories are somewhat connected because at one time there were several of the homeless that took up shelter inside and around the closed tobacco factory.

The image above is one that I photographed as I made my way around the backside of the factory one day. It's an image of a religious figure that someone has hung like a framed piece of art in a makeshift living space against the wall of the factory.

I thought it might be appropriate to pull out my photos again from the project and post them here.

The Aliens Have Not Landed

Of all the times I've been out observing in this field I have yet to see anything "strange." But if anything does happen to come along I hope it's not in the form of a space ship, an alien and a ray-gun. Sometimes I get a little tired of stargazing so I get out the camera and try to create the first thing that comes to mind. This is not a recent piece but it's one of several that I've just re-toned after letting them sit for a while. To see some more, go HERE.

Is there a true connection between science and art? There's probably not a better example to argue for it than British photographer Eadweard Muybridge's famous freeze-frame sequence showing a horse's gait as it galloped along a track in 1878. The sequence of 16 frames, produced with 12 cameras, settled the argument centered on the question of whether there was a moment in the horse's gait when all four hooves were off the ground at once. Muybridge died in May (1904) so I've decided to honor him with my piece, above, a modern take on his famous sequence.