Fling and a miss

Last night I got to spend some time at the Ocean Park School carnival, and mostly checked out the "dunk the principal" game. Some had better luck than others.
It's kinda funny but the first post I ever did when I first started this blog back in May 2007 was a pic of the "dunk the principal" game at the Long Beach School carnival that spring. Well, 367 posts later it kinda comes full circle in a way. You can check that out HERE if you like.

Yeah, that's a giant mustache...

-DKM

Next year in the Holy Land

On Monday night I had the opportunity to photograph a Passover Seder. This is something I've wanted to do for quite awhile, as I've always been interested in various religious ceremony. It took place at the home of Mike and Barbara Carmel, who invited over various friends, relatives and community folk, including me. And there was soooo very much food, some of which I had never heard of before, but all smelled tremendous.
















Shalom,

-DKM

Can blight be beautiful?

File this under the "I love old, broken down, inanimate stuff" category. These go along with a column I have coming in the paper next week.
I've had the idea of doing a photo series of blight-ridden stuff that has been left behind by people. And this week ended up being the week I got around to it. Above is an old sign for a country dance place up in Ocean Park. I'm assuming it used to rotate in the wind, giving the illusion of a dancing couple. These days the sign is overgrown by willows, and the lady is missing her head.

See more after the jump below

Sun and Rain

The sun came out the other day, can you believe it? I mean, it's spring and all but you wouldn't know it most of the time. So I took advantage and went to shoot only my second softball or baseball game of the season. I really like shooting at the Naselle softball field, as it has great backdrops for the action. I didn't even mind that for some reason the NHS varsity was playing the IHS JV.




Here's a link to a gallery of pix from this game HERE (and they're in color...)


The weather was a wee bit different earlier in the week when I went to Seaside for the annual track meet put on by our sister paper, the Daily Astorian. Unfortunately I could only stay for an hour thanks to other commitments elsewhere. But thankfully I was only there for an hour, as I was totally soaked in that time.



-DKM

Razor hunting

This morning I had the chance to do something I thankfully rarely have to do — re-shoot an assignment. The last half of this week we had AM razor clam tides on the Peninsula, also kind of a rarity around here as normally the clam tides come in the evenings, causing people to scour the shoreline with all manner of lamps. To make things even better, we actually had some some pretty nice weather the last few days. Unfortunately for me, I got really bad pix when I went out yesterday, so tried again today with much better success, IMO. I walked the shore roundtrip about two miles or so. Thankfully I had Thelonious Monk to keep me company — the albums Brilliant Corners on the way up and Criss Cross on the way back.

Cette semaine portraits

Couldn't think of a clever title, so went for this week's portraits en Francais

Well you just can't beat window light in a kitchen can you?
This is Larkin Stentz, owner of the Green Angel organic farm here in town. This week we're profiling him and the farm in a story about land foreclosures, in this case his farm land.
Over the years I've taken Larkin's photo a number of times for various things, as he has been a pretty active fellow in the community. In fact I did a story and photos on his long forgotten Hilltop School gardens project eight years ago, back in my first year with the Observer. In fact it was almost eight years to the day, as that story ran on April 9, 2003. Have to say this is probably my fave pic I've taken of him thru the years.


On the Life page this week we have a nice piece by Amanda Frink on Kenzi Abbott, a girl from Cathlamet who recently had a young dog donated to her that is being trained as a service dog. She suffers from diabetes and grand mol seizures and the dog, once trained, will be able to sense and alert when such things happen.
Right now though he's still a puppy and has a lot of work to do before he's able to do those things. But being a pet and friend is a good thing too.

-DKM