Missouri

En Route

Posted May 24, 2010 by Ivy

Hm, haven’t updated in a while. Here’s what happened since the last post:

*Defended thesis.

*Graduated from Mizzou with my Master of Arts degree.

*Got a freelance photo job with the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette for the summer. I’ll have to find some sort of other work as well to supplement it, but I’m pretty excited (and nervous)!

So now I’m back at home in Connecticut for a week decompressing before the summer jobs start. I made one last MoEx trip from Columbia to the St. Louis airport two days ago, and took this photo out the window of the shuttle bus. I think it pretty accurately sums up I-70 in Missouri.

K is for Kauffman

Posted April 11, 2010 by Ivy

I’m slowly working my way through all of the Major League Baseball ballparks in the country. So far I’ve been to a third of them*; I added my tenth last night when I went to see the Red Sox (my most favorite team ever) play Kansas City at the K. Having now been to both of the Missouri ballparks, I can confidently say that, while I love the roofdeck at Busch Stadium, I like the overall coziness of Kauffman much better. I think I also might have preferred the Cardinals’ old stadium to their current one.

Anyway, the game itself was excellent–it was a matchup of Zack Greinke and Josh Beckett, which is in itself fantastic. The game itself was pretty competitive for the first few innings, until the old guard of the Sox (Jason Varitek and Mike Lowell) decided they might as well make the most of their limitd playing time and hit some home runs. Once Greinke was taken out of the game, it was over for the Royals. A huge thank-you must go out to Laura Herring and her friends who were also at the game for not giving this Red Sox fan a hard time about her team loyalties!

We were in the nosebleed section, and my 70-300mm can only do so much from that range, but I tried to make a few photos anyway:

*I am doing much better in my parallel quest to go to all the NPB parks in Japan. I’ve been to six, with six more to go.

Zack Greinke. He was on my first and only fantasy baseball team five years ago.

Jacoby Ellsbury all alone in the outfield

There was a hot dog race. Ketchup won. He’s so jaunty!

People started leaving in the seventh. Boooo.

Laura’s boyfriend kept score the whole game.

I have NEVER seen the opposing team’s gear for sale in an MLB team store. They do that everywhere in Japan, but here it seems kind of weird.

Wide-open shutter…

In Praise of the Disposable Camera, part four

Posted April 1, 2010 by Ivy

This one’s from the archives—summer 2007. It was taken with a waterproof disposable camera while I was treading water in the channel. My cousin (the one jumping) is a total rock star.

(9) Squaring Off, St. Louis Edition

Posted February 23, 2010 by Ivy

I am currently en route to Memphis to do thesis research (very, very long story), and stopped in St. Louis for the night to stay with my friend Sanya, who’s in med school here.

I got to the city well before Sanya’s classes got out, so I spent most of the afternoon actually being productive. Then I went back to my New York Times crossword puzzle (this week’s; I gave up on the one I had been fighting with before), and productivity went out the window again.

Left: I filled all but three of the blank spaces, which has never happened before! And the answer to one of the clues was “ASHE,” which was, frankly, quite awesome.

Right: Sanya is a much more diligent studier than I am. This is probably why she’s in med school and I am not.

Nothing But Net

Posted February 9, 2010 by Ivy

If I had more time this semester, I would do a project on injuries in PeeWee Hockey. Eight-year-olds are intense.

(This was actually taken last semester when I was working on my 30-Day Story…but hockey wasn’t my focus at all, so I forgot about it till now.)

30-Day Story!

Posted December 20, 2009 by Ivy

I can’t put SoundSlides on this blog, and am still working on setting up a wordpress.org site…soooo in the meantime, here is a link to my final project for Picture Story. This was the third story I tried getting access to for the project (third try’s the charm!), and even though I really wish I had been able to spend more time with the family (more than three days, for starters), I’m still glad I found the story and was able to tell it. I plan to keep working on this next semester, when the new baby’s due date gets closer.

The link is here– I definitely recommend enabling captions.

Enjoy!

Holiday Lights!

Posted December 11, 2009 by Ivy

I went to a “Dinner with Santa” festival tonight (put on by the National Junior Honor Society at one of the St. Louis middle schools) with my final project family, and, between taking photos of pancake tosses and kids making “reindeer food” (oatmeal with glitter mixed in, which seems unhealthy for anyone), made the second annual Lights au Natural photo (or, “How I Would See the Lights If I Took My Glasses Off”). Here’s last year’s, which was taken at the Magic Tree in Columbia:

This year’s is not nearly as brilliantly colorful, but I liked the background of the fake white tree:

And finally, here’s the teeny little tree at my friend Sanya’s apartment (no experimental out-of-focus blurs here, just one fixed 28mm):

Long Time Coming: The 30-Day Job Profile

Posted December 4, 2009 by Ivy

Our last two assignments in Picture Story are the video job profile and the 30-Day Story. I give to you now the 30-Day Job Profile (I also did the 30-Day Character Profile earlier this semester), which has been in the works since the second week of October. I wish I could just submit this for the actual end-of-term project, since it’s been a real marathon trying to find a subject who’ll stay with the project…but oh well.

Here is a story about a team of ocularists (people who make artificial eyes) in St. Louis. I hope it manages to showcase without being boring, and if it IS boring, please tell me so I can make it better. As always, making the final project better is the ultimate goal.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B7aLuA6sSQ]

More on this whole profile saga is under the cut, as I’m guessing people don’t want to read my ramblings-on.

Continue reading →

Character Profile: Re-Edit

Posted November 2, 2009 by Ivy

We got to re-edit our character profiles in FinalCut, which gave me a chance to go back and clean up all of my terrible audio from the first go-around. It’s still far from perfect, but wayyy better than before. I had two more shoots to incorporate into the profile, one of which was an all-day affair (see previous post), which made for an interesting re-edit since I was trying to keep the basic narrative the same. Here’s hoping it worked okay.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDLi2j0gVGM]

I'm with the Band: Greater STL Marching Festival, part two

Posted October 25, 2009 by Ivy

I should be working on my thesis prospectus right now, but there’s nothing like a paper to make you decide to catch up on blogging.

As the previous post said, I spent yesterday at the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis following my Character Profile subjects (all 120+ of them) through the paces of performing at a band festival. Theoretically the photos I took would be incorporated into my Picture Story multimedia piece, but that’s going to need some serious re-editing in order to fit in the additional element of festival competitions. We’ll see if I have time to pull that off (again, that thesis prospectus…). In the meantime, here’s a visual summary of (almost) everything that happened yesterday.