Akron Holidayfest

One of my family's holiday traditions over the last few years has included going to Akron's "Holiday Lighting Spectacular" Downtown at Lock 3. The city and sponsors put on a great fireworks display with an appearance/skit involving Santa. Afterwords we check out the Christkindl Market, watch some ice skating, then head out for a few drinks at one of the Downtown bars. Even with some of the cut-backs (due to the budget) it was still a good time.

My Thanksgiving

As I've gotten older Thanksgiving has become my favorite holiday. All you are supposed to do is eat good food, hang out with friends and family, and watch football(or play football(see previous post)).

The top photo is my family relaxing after diner - I took it from the stairs bouncing my flash off the ceiling. Below are a few of my other favorites from the day.

My Cousin Jeff brought a deep fryer this year and thats how we made the turkey - it turned out awesome. We also threw the sweet potatoes in the fryer which worked out really well too. I hope everyone had as great a weekend as I did....

Window Silliness

I wanted to go out and do some night photography last evening but the rain kept me inside - so this is the view out of my dining room window. I put my camera on a tripod and took a 13 second exposure with my 50mm lens - I added some saturation during post-processing. Nice corny post title, eh?

Browns Town

My brother was given some club seat tickets for the Monday Night Browns game - he invited Kyle, Laura and myself to go with him. Even though none of us expected to see anything too pretty from the Browns it is still fun to go up and suck in some atmosphere(and mess around with our cameras). This photo is of Kyle and Laura before the game started - when moods were still high. We stayed until there was about 2 minutes left in the 3rd quarter - which is about when everyone else stayed until as well.

Shapes of Things

This is a photo of the newish Towpath Bridge over the Akron Innerbelt. I hadn't hiked in the Cascade Locks area since they built the bridge. I used to love hiking down there when they had the old trail on the other side of the canal. I shot a roll of film here with my Minolta XG1 right before they put the towpath in, but I accidentally exposed it - which still annoys me when I go there.

I think that the cool shadows and shapes in the photo stand out more in black and white. I was also inspired to do some B&W by Mencken's last post.

My girlfriend was with me and she decide to show off her gymnastic abilities, you can check out that photo here. Kyle also took some photos of the bridge a while back when it was still under construction. You can take a peak at those too.

Final Farm Post

Winding down the season at Szalay's Farm.

Switches

About a year ago my friend Pete Milo asked me to do some photos for a new music project he was working on. After the shoot we were looking through some of the photos in Google's photo-editing program Picasa. I accidently clicked on something and it turned the photos into a time-lapse style movie. We started messing around with this feature - throwing more photos I had of Pete in it and adding some music. Eventually the obvious hit us - let's add his song and turn this into a real video. We did a few more shoots but then kind of moved on and never finished it. Today I started to think of this project after seeing a video Ted Mallison made for the Akron band Drummer. So I decided to finish it up and put it on the old YouTube.

It took over 1,000 photos to make this...

Deere at Dawn

Down at the farm we've switched over to our fall hours. I don't have to be there as early but since I'm so used to waking up I decided to head on down before work with my camera on Tuesday. I wanted to capture some of the really pretty foggy scenes I've seen from the tractor on my way to the fields in the mornings this summer. On this morning the sun hadn't burned off enough of the fog yet for me to get much besides a mostly white picture that I could've sold as a postcard titled "valley in the morning" to dumb tourists. The sun coming over the top of the trees on the valley wall did however make for some cool, diffused side-lighting that you can see on this photo of a couple of the tractors. In the foreground is the John Deere 7830 and in the back is the 4WD 7820.
These days the most common place to see a Deere & Co. logo is on a t-shirt or baseball cap - at the farm we have a phrase for these farm gear enthusiasts and K-Mart cowboys, "all hat, no cattle."

Picking

Last week when we were all taking pictures of the snapping turtles I suddenly realized I was supposed to be running a wagon to Johnny. He was picking a load of sweet corn from the Bender South field on Akron-Peninsula Road. I got there before he was done and since I still had my camera on me I shot a few photos. He's using a Pixall Big Jack with a four row sweet corn picking head.

We will be getting into our last planting of the season tomorrow - we'll be picking corn for about another week or so. So stop on down to Szalay's and get some of the last of the season and a pumpkin or three....

Baby Snappers

In early June John Szalay(owner of Szalay's Farm) saw a snapping turtle lay its eggs in one of the fields. Since the field was going to be planted he dug up the eggs and placed them in a bushel basket. The basket sat all summer by the dumpster - we kind of forgot about it as it seemed to be getting late for any action - last week Johnny Szalay said he was going to throw it out. Today my friend Dave(pictured below) was cleaning up and noticed that the turtles had hatched and were climbing out of a hole in the dirt. They were so cute we all grabbed our cameras and snapped a few of the snappers. We counted at least 10 that hatched (a few escaped and we freed a few in Furnace Run).

Farming leaves very little time for photo-taking but I do keep my camera in my car with my 50mm lens in case I have the chance to use it. Today was a day that made me glad it was there.

Munroe Falls

On Saturday Kyle, a group of friend and I went to Munroe Falls Metro Park. We cooked some burgers, hot dogs and sausage, went for a couple swims, threw the football around and mixed up a few "special" drinks. We talked about how it felt like a mini-vacation and what a good use of a beautiful weekend day it was. In my opinion you have to do a few things like this over the summer to earn the right to complain when its 5 degrees out with ten inches of snow on the ground.
Its easy to forget that we have places like this around to go and enjoy.

Since we get asked a lot here if we "enhance" or "photoshop" our photos I figured I explain a few things I did to this one of Kyle.

First I cropped it in a little bit(to 5 by 7). I turned up the saturation and vibrance to make the greens and blues pop more and then balanced the color to make it look more natural. Since I used the flash I had to darken the grill to make it more black instead of the more blown out grey that it looked at first. I turned up the overall contrast a bit and then added some sharpening. Last I converted it from a tiff to a jpeg and uploaded it to flickr.

Fun with Flashes

Kyle and I went to a friend of his Dad's on Saturday to shoot some photos and practice our lighting skills. We brought two flashes, two light stands and two shoot-through umbrellas. We took turns passing the camera back and forth and adjusting our flash placement. We used the self-timer for the shots with both of us.

We had some fun, got a little experience and came away with some cool shots.
Side Note: If you're an Akron resident don't to forget to vote in tomorrow's recall election. Here at The Chief Source we come down on the Mayor's side - so vote against it!!!

Gabe at Fairlawn Lanes

My friend Gabe and I were hanging out shooting some photos....we both felt fairly devoid of ideas - Gabe then suggested heading over to the old Fairlawn Lanes building. We walked there with my umbrella and flash and snapped a few different things. I really liked this one - the dilapidated bowling alley made for a good background.

I remember a few years back I heard one of the owners of Annabell's bought this place. For a couple of months I saw some activity - some new drywall going in and a fresh coat of paint on the outside - but ever since then its been left to rot again....

Tiger Fighter

I took this photo of the new band Tiger Fighter in the basement of Square Records in Highland Square. They are a typical Akron band in the sense that every member is also already in another band. Dave plays in Houseguest, Andrew and Matt are in Big Sur, and Ian is in Twilight Hobs. They play their first show a week from Friday at Musica opening up for Drummer(Pat from the Black Keys other band). They don't have anything recorded yet but I heard them play a few songs and it will be a show worth checking out...
I lighted this photo using two flashes shot through umbrellas and I knocked the shutter speed down a bit to get the string of lights in the background to show up.