Photo A Week: #8 - MMJ

For the eighth installment of the ever-popular Photo A Week series here on Pixblog, I present My Morning Jacket, a Louisville band, playing Knoxville's regal Tennessee Theater.

Two plugged-in guitarists and a drummer that could kick a hole through Meg White

Special prize to the first person to spot the pork rinds (the band is, for obvious reasons, excluded from this promotion).

Broadway

Broadway is, arguably, the central vein of old Knoxville. It starts downtown and snakes north, passing my Fountain City home along the way. Today I started a project on Broadway that I've been thinking about for a while. Mostly documentation, nothing fancy. The thing I've learned about projects is that the hardest part is starting. So here's my start.


This is Fast Eddie. He owns, coincidently, Fast Eddie's Auto Part in Fountain City. Both the 'Fart Machine' muffler and Pet Rock, below, are his. Funny story aboout the Pet Rock. It sits across the street from his store, probably 100 feet. When Eddie was building the store in 1983 he had to blast out the hill to make room. He and his friends, who may have been drinking Eddie admits, put a little too much powder in the blasting holes and blew the Pet Rock to its current home across the street. Smaller pieces of stone flew across Broadway, another 200 feet or so, where they blocked the passage of cars until the city came to sweep up.

From the Archive: Rodeo

As part of my many, loosely-defined, and ever-changing New Year resolutions, I'm going through many years of pictures that are laying in piles of negatives and on random hard drives in my office, trying to consolidate and organize. So I'll be posting older stuff mixed in with the new as the weeks and months go by.

Here's a picture from the annual Isom Rodeo in eastern Kentucky. Isom is tiny little town about ten miles from Whitesburg. It's population triples on the night of the rodeo.

More MOMA

From the same mystery roll/museum as my previous post:





Half-way through toning the picture of the statue, I remembered a conversation I had with our buddy J. B. West just the other day about how much I hate it when people photograph works of are (i.e. statues) and pass it off as art. So, DISCLAIMER: The picture of a statue, above, should not be confused with high art, no matter how hard your heart insists. That is all.

Photo A Week: #7

This is a picture from a mystery roll of film I got back from the lab today. It was taken at the MOMA. I've always felt bad for security guards at museums. They spend countless hours staring off into space, waiting for me to raise my camera before leaping into action to halt my trigger finger. Must take a lot out of them. Cheers, security friends, this one's for you.

Three most important things about photography: Backup, backup, backup.

I bought my first real digital camera in 2004. Since then my soul has been filling, ever so slowly, with the existential dread of the coming Hard Drive Failure. Unlike the Singularity, which has roughly the same effect on my nerves, the Hard Drive Failure is easily avoidable. Actually, the loss of data connected to Hard Drive Failure is easily avoidable. Hard drives, like every other moving-parts machine, will eventually fail. But a good backup strategy will let you laugh these failures off like a bad Will Smith movie.

I recently found a great primer to backing up digital photos at Chase Jarvis' blog. Here's the abbreviated version:

1. Make your work ORGANIZED.
2.Choose the right STORAGE MEDIUM.
3.Keep a CLEAN COPY OF THE ORIGINAL DATA.
4.Make it REDUNDANT.
5.Keep 'em SEPARATE.

Good advice, all. Now I just need to practice what I preach and impliment a system of my own. I'll add that to my running list of New Year's resolutions.