It was another gorgeous time of camping at Council Grove, KS.

School’s out, and I am positively bursting with the desire to explore and know; to capture and learn. This past weekend was a good start.

I recently acquired a Pinwide pinhole lens for my Olympus E-P1, an ingenious little beast that completely changed my normal 20mm perspective. With a pinhole lens, the aperture is the equivalent of 11mm, which means that the perspective is extremely wide-angle. And, of course, like every pinhole, everything is in focus and nothing is in focus; the nearly infinite depth of field guarantees that everything is bathed in an equally soft blur.

I’m going to have fun experimenting with this lens this summer.

There’s this bridge in Wichita, KS overlooking a highway and it has a footbridge. i’m obsessed with footbridges.

[narrowcolumn foo="bar" side="left"]If you have to ask why i see urban/civilized landscapes in black and white, you and i are probably never going to be friends. If you see these things in color, you need to squint more and probably should probably should meet a homeless person who lives on the North Side of Pittsburgh named Aaron.[/narrowcolumn]

[narrowcolumn foo="bar" side="right"]i only have one more paper—6 pages—to complete this semester’s transformation into only a memory. One paper—yet here i sit. it doesn’t help that as of 24 hours ago i’m in white Pennsylvania, my right foot hopelessly curled on top of my left one, as if to say, “if we both freeze, i’ll go first,” and blissfully unproductive.[/narrowcolumn]

This is my the-semester-is-over-and-i'm-still-alive celebratory drink.

The war for survival

A virus outbreak here on campus spawned undead with abnormally contagious powers. Thankfully, they could be stunned with Nerf guns and typically starved after two days without feeding.

My ever-present, unbelievably gigantic ammo magazine came in handy when being attacked repeatedly by the especially vigilant Daniel Lassman zombie.

The zombie moves in for the kill, while the human with the ginormous ammo magazine stands steadfast

First things first

i promised one more memoriam to summer; i was thinking along the lines of the photo highlights of summer. That’s when i realized, i could show my appreciation for Count Summer by going on another trip, one last adventure before the cold comes.

Here goes

Fall break: me and a buddy got on our bikes and headed northeast, into Kansas’ beautiful flint hills region. We pitched camp in a rancher’s cow pasture one night. We discovered a lake close to the northern edge of the flint hills and spent the better part of our borrowed time there, breathing and smelling and running and dancing with the sun.

Goodbye, Summer. Hello, Sir Autumn.

Fire is your friend

Well, for photography anyway. It provides this killer harsh light that just begs photos to be processed in scary black and white colors. Some people are just creepier in the dark than others, i think.

And then some people just look distinguished

Uhuh. We pyros are quite something.