Home territory barns

If you arrived here looking for an article on the Blues Music Awards, scroll down past this new post or click here. A big benefit of residing in a not-to-terribly-large metro area is that you are still close to the last vestiges of the former predominantly rural society experienced by our parents and grandparents, to [...]

Top of the blues to ya!

Being a blues fan and a photographer — and hovering around the stage — and shooting the 2012 Blues Music Awards at the Cook Convention Center in Memphis, Tennessee is a highly desirable combination of circumstances I recently enjoyed. You can get in on the start of this story on the Photo of the Week [...]

A bear, a monkey, and a locomotive redux

Back in November of 2009, I ran shy of current subject matter and was compelled to dig into the archives to populate the Weekly Grist and Corndancer Photo of the Week pages. Mind you, these were film archives, 35mm transparencies, no less, so we are talking late eighties and early to mid nineties. Lots of [...]

There goes the neighborhood (again)

A couple of years ago about this time I wandered into Lincoln County, Arkansas and plied its gravel roads in search of a story. I found a couple of old houses barely visible from the road — infested with a cubic acre or so of mosquitoes. Fortunately I had slathered my person liberally with Deep Woods [...]

“Been-gone” barns

Getting around to it During a short day trip to a family affair, I finally got around to a serious shot of a barn that had lingered on my “to-shoot” list for far too long. The shortest A to B distance from our domicile to the event put us right past the deteriorating, ivy-decorated structure, [...]

Looking for leaves, finding a dog

A nagging itch for mountain air The last week of October, 2010, I had this terrible itch to breathe some mountain air, so I conjured up the fantasy that I was about to miss some of the best days of the spectacular Ozarks fall leaf display. Sufficiently armed with this fallacy, and relishing the thoughts [...]

A Wet Woolly

Woolly redux: wet, but not so wild A couple of years ago about this time, the bottom dropped out all over Arkansas and particularly in Central Arkansas including the area around Woolly Hollow State Park. While the griping was rampant during the storms, the aftermath was rewarding. The crown jewel of the park is Lake [...]

Sign of life revisited

I finally got around to shooting an old house I’d been eying for a while back in December of 2010. In so doing, I made a couple of discoveries. One was a large fat snake in the abandoned kitchen — both of us wisely ignored each other — and a spindly plant in front of [...]

Look around and down

Geodesic dome designers, eat your hearts out, Mother Nature has bested you before you leave the blocks. The common dandelion, hated by many and admired by few, is an engineering marvel available for viewing in most back yards. Though they are the target of many a squirt of Roundup, I admire their yellow blooms and [...]

Sabbatical

Sabbatical this week For the first time in a number of years, I am taking a sabbatical this week. Today is my birthday and as a present to my self, I am going to bed early. I will come roaring back next Sunday night with new stuff here and on the Photo of the Week [...]