Barber Shop or Museum? Part 9

More useless collectibles from the Shear-Cut on Fife Street.

Quiet Sickness

Is that anything like motion sickness?

Seen at the grocery store...

...a confusing product.

Nuts and Bolts

How to pronounce "Kanawha"

A few minutes ago, Sitemeter tells me that somebody came to my site by Googling the keywords pronounce, kanawha. I don't actually have that information here... perhaps we should remedy that.
Below is a photo of the Kanawha River which runs through Kanawha County in West Virginia.

You pronounce it kuh-NAH-wuh... roughly. Run it together real fast until it sounds like kuh-NAW. If you have another way of spelling the pronunciation, leave it in the comments. If you are not from around here, you'd probably try to say CAN-uh-WHA but that's not correct. I've seen it spelled all kinds of ways on old maps... Canawa, etc. Naturally it's an Indian word, the meaning of which is uncertain.

Bottles

Shooting fish in a barrell...

... is not a good metaphor for this post. It implies that it's really easy. I enjoy taking photos of (avoiding the word shooting here) fish in tanks. It's not easy to even get one in focus much less get a good composition. But if you persevere, you can have some great serendipity moments where it seems that everything comes together. A lot of photography is like that.





By the way, if I did this in the studio with beautiful controlled flash lighting it would be a lot easier and the results would be a lot prettier. The glass would be clean and the images would be grainless and perfect. These were shot in the Wal-Mart store on grocery night so it was a little more challenging.

Cactus Flower

A while back I blogged some photos of my mom's cactus. When I was at her house today, the darn thing was blooming. As I said, my mom's green thumb is legendary.

Magnetic Ambulance Chasing

I was working at a local tv station today and I was quite amused to see that somebody has saved all of the law firm advertising magnets from all of their phone directories going back who knows how long and put them on a large steel door. It makes quite a display.

Hospital Atrium

Produce Blogging #40

Because Thursday night (a day late) is grocery night!

Where's the produce?

Sorry I didn't get my grocery night pics up last night. I was having some trouble with Blogger. I'll a post up later today I hope.

Test tube blue

Working in a lab today... blood doesn't photograph real well... it's very dark... so we made up some pretty blue stuff.

Blue Eyes , Glasses

Tiny little machined parts

Seen at the gas station...

... we're not exactly excellent, but we're not that bad!

More shameless nepotism

If you haven't been to my nephew's photoblog in a while, he has a bunch of new photos up.

New Fuji pocket camera pushes 3200 ISO!

People are always asking me about the camera I use for these blog photos. I have discussed my pocket camera and my professional cameras here. FYI... Fuji just announced a new pocket camera that I'll probably be getting soon.

"After almost a decade of obsession with pixel counts, Fujifilm is proud to announce the launch of the FinePix F30 Zoom, a camera which confirms a new stage in the evolution of digital camera technology. Breaking away from the tired and irrelevant practice of pixel counting, the FinePix F30 Zoom is the world’s first digital compact camera to deliver ISO 3200 sensitivity at full resolution. Fujifilm has identified sensitivity as one of the major photographic benchmarks for the digital age, and this camera makes it possible to capture images of unrivalled quality, even in very dark conditions."

I wish the camera industry would publish some sort of benchmark for noise at higher ISO settings. It's truly irrelevent how many megapixels a camera has if those megapixels are full of noise (looks grainy). Fuji is leading the way in low-noise pocket cameras and this is a very good thing, but without some sort of benchmark for comparison, I don't know how we can push this discussion into the mainstream.

Richard Bright, actor, dead at 68

According to Sitemeter, today I got a lot of Google hits because somebody famous was hit by a bus. The actor, Richard Bright who was in the Godfather movies and The Sopranos died on New York's upper west side. If you Google the keywords richard, bright, photo you'll get a link to my post about Wal-Mart "Bright Lights, Empty Aisles". Although it's obviously not about the intended search, apparently a lot of people were curious enough to click on it. By the way, here at left is a photo of Richard Bright I found on the web.

Factory Floor

At first glance, you might think this is a brick floor but it's not. Occasionally one sees factory floors made of hardwood boards stood on their ends like this. I have no idea why this material is used.

Mystery #65

Do you know what this is? Post your guesses in the comments.

Old Bowling Alley

Thank goodness this bowling alley couldn't afford to remodel when this old AMF stuff went out of style.

Snow on Hunters Ridge, version 2

Here's another version of this shot.

Gross-Belch

I spent the day at West Virginia University in Morgantown working on a TV commercial. Campus is covered in student government campaign materials. This slate seems to be getting a lot of attention.

Blue Eye

Winter Trees with Sunset Clouds

Light Blogging

I want to apologize for light blogging. I'm on the road and the hotel last night didn't have Internet access. Only marginal tonight. I'll try to get something up later.

From Both Sides Now

It's interesting to look at the same scene from opposites views.

Returning from the store

I had to follow this guy down an alley today. He was riding so slowly he could barely keep the bike upright. I decided to make positive use of the time by whipping out my pocket camera and grabbing a few shots as we made our way.

Sunset with snow

Snow on Hunters Ridge

Well... at long last, we got some measurable snow. We missed the big blizzard because it didn't get cold enough to really stick until Saturday night.

A few more from PF Chang's

Mystery #64

Do you know what this is? Post your guesses in the comments.

Mystery #63

Do you know what this is? Post your guesses in the comments.

Uncommon Cold

I went to Columbus today to photograph these nice people inside a deep freeze room with a vast collection of ice cores. When I got there, I asked them just how cold it was in that room and they said "about minus 20". "Excuse me?" I was expecting it to be just below freezing. I had no idea if my camera gear would even work in there. The camera gear was less trouble than my fingers which started hurting real bad after about 15 minutes. Poor Dr. Thompson's nose turned white but he's used to it. That's me on the right saying "We're done... why are we still in here??" Thanks to Jack Houvouras for manning the camera to get a shot of me. At first Jack said he wasn't even going in there, but then he proved his manhood and stayed in there just as long as any of us.

Produce Blogging #39

Because Thursday night is grocery night!