Meet Barack Obama (and about 40,000 Missourians)

I won the battle over fatigue and tromped around the Obama rally, taking pictures, hearing his voice for real-real and admiring how many different people turned out to show their support.

I left my apartment a little after 9 p.m. for the 9:30 speech but my friend Clint (he's the beleaguered but joyous one toward the end) got in line at 1:45 p.m. - he's just better at caring about stuff like this. It really paid off for him, though - he shook the senator's hand.

It was nice to just wander around, taking nice little pictures for myself, listening to Obama and the fans as I relaxed from one of the toughest weeks I've had in school.


Watching the speech on one of the screens.

I don't care if this was done for a photo-op backdrop, I liked it a whole lot.

Sorry for the quick & dirty toning on this...perhaps one day I'll come back and clean it up...

He's in this shot, I swear! Go to the shorter lightpost to the right of "CHANGE" and go down to the big black box. That's his lectern. Woo.

Hooray for arts & crafts.

This is deliciously Midwestern and Obama thanked the crowd for it. He even said "Mi-zur-uh."

Because no one has ever seen the Lectern of Change...

Clint is such a trooper.

Can't have politics without a protest.

...or campaign buttons.

Meet Color Correction

(October 27, 2008) Andy Ritts, a Missouri graduate student in Mechanical Engineering, ponders his response to a discussion question at Monday night’s Bible study in the Wesley Student Center at the Missouri United Methodist Church in Columbia. Ritts leads the Bible study, which spent Monday studying the third chapter of Ephesians, a book in the New Testament. Over the course of the fall semester, the group will study the rest of Ephesians.

Meet Single Flash

(Columbia, Mo., October 21, 2008) Donte Bennett sings the tenor part of “He Has Made Me Glad” at Tuesday evening’s rehearsal of the Legions of Black Collegians gospel choir in the Gaines Oldham Black Cultural Center at the University of Missouri. Bennett, a senior, is co-director of the choir and also plays drums and bass guitar on occasion.




(Columbia, Mo., October 21, 2008) Carmen Fields, co-director of the Legions of Black Collegians gospel choir at the University of Missouri, laughs at a joke made by one of the choir’s musicians during rehearsal Tuesday night at the Gaines Oldham Black Cultural Center. Fields had the members of the choir stand in a circle next to singers of different vocal parts to help the group fine-tune the song “The Blood”, which they are preparing to sing at their winter concert in December.

Meet Metal & Glass

Here is my best image for the metal and glass assignment. Though I had the metal half of this, my object had both, plus a shiny box in the background, so there was a whole family tree of angles. I'm fairly pleased with the results, though I'd tweak the framing, back up a bit for deeper depth of field and try to get that one facet to not have a light reflection. But, overall, I'm happy with the shot and certainly learned a lot on this assignment.



(Columbia, Mo. October 15, 2008) When designing baseball’s greatest prize, a world series ring, the 2007 World Champion Boston Red Sox formed a committee of both players and front office members, who opted to modify the team’s 2004 design, replacing that year’s “B” with the team’s other logo, hanging red socks. The ring is cast in white gold with 42 total diamonds, eight natural rubies and four synthetic sapphires. Along one side of the ring is an engraving of Fenway Park with “7th World Championship” and “4-0 Sweep” and on the other are the Boston “B,” a replica of the World Series trophy and the ring owner’s last name. Inside the ring, the date “10-28-07” is engraved, commemorating the date of the title game.

Meet some bling:

This isn't my final "metal" shot yet...I'm hoping to go back in and brighten up the underside of the ring so that "champions" is easier to read. Just wanted to put this out there to see what people think...