Category Archives: kansas

Hittin’ the Trail

Here’s a shot from last summer’s trip to St. Joseph, Missouri, that I’ve been intending to post for weeks and it never seemed to happen. It’s the old sign for the Trail Theater. I love old signage and I love typography so I’m always drawn to things like this. Somehow it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting if it were all shiny and new. I think the patina of time is the real subject of these shots. Between this and my recent Bowling Alley post, I think you can see a trend developing.

It’s been a busy few months around here. Unfortunately, much of the assignment work that I’ve been doing has to stay under wraps until the stories run. I have so much that I’d like to post, but it will have to wait a little while. The title of this post is timely, though, as I’m beginning to prepare for my next international trip to New Zealand. Between now and departure day, I’ll try and get caught up with some more images from the last couple of months and keep you all posted on some changes to my gear for this trip. No huge changes, but some little tweaks that I’m hoping will make big differences.

Battle of Black Jack

Today’s shoot comes from a reenactment held this morning of the 1856 Battle of Black Jack, where John Brown began his war on slavery near what is now Baldwin City, Kansas — then just a camp along the Santa Fe Trail. I’ll leave it to the battlefield’s website to give the history. For me it was just a great morning of shooting (no pun intended). I’ve just had a couple of hours to begin sorting through the take, but here are a few I like so far…







I like my water clear, thank you

Adjusting this photo from Saturday’s NE Kansas excursion was a little more work than it needed to be. This is the Buffalo Soldier Memorial at Fort Leavenworth and apparently someone thinks the water looks better dyed an unnatural blue/green color. That, or it’s been this way since St. Patty’s day. Maybe there is some other perfectly reasonable explanation for the water’s color, but it looked really, really strange in the falls below the sculpture. You can see for yourself in the un-fixed horizontal version below:

Note to all fountain owners — green water doesn’t look better! In Lightroom, I had to go through a whole process of selectively desaturating the aqua range of the color spectrum and painting in with the adjustment brush a combination of increased contrast and desaturation until things were looking somewhat natural again. Whew.

By the way, I was also putting a new camera bag through its paces on Saturday. For my upcoming Fiji trip in just a few days, I picked up a new Think Tank Sling-O-Matic. Here’s a photo of it from their site:

I had originally planned on getting the smaller Sling-O-Matic 10 but it wasn’t in stock locally and upon seeing the size of the 20, thought it might better fit my gear. This bag is slightly smaller than my Think Tank Airport Ultralight and is a sling-bag instead of a full backpack. While I’ll miss the distribution of the weight across both shoulders, I welcome the ability to swing the bag around to access lenses without taking the bag off.

The bag worked great on Sunday and I look forward to seeing how it does on a longer trip. My Ultralight fit nearly every overhead compartment I encountered although it was a bit tight in some. This one should slide right in, but the laptop will have to be carried separately in its own sleeve. There is a side pocket that will take the laptop on the Sling, but an inch or so sticks out and I’d be a little nervous that it might work its way out while out of my view on my back (the way the pockets work is that they’re top-opening when you sling the bag ’round front, but are side-opening when worn on the back).

I’ll report back after the Sling has logged a few air miles.

Red barn

Taking advantage of a nice Spring day, I rode along with my buddy, Doug Stremel, as he scouted a Kansas Byways project he’s working on. We covered a good portion of the northeast corner of the state and ran across some great locations like this amazing red barn. I think I’ll be coming back here once the crops are in — and I won’t be surprised if I run into Doug there when I do.