It has been a super busy spring and summer. I decided that I needed to get back into photography. So I’ve been shooting event photography. I’ve been to gymnastics meets, graduations, soccer tournaments, marathons and triathlons. It has been cold, hot and even one day we got rained out.

Photographing soccer.

If you’ve never shot event photography, I recommend it. It is fun and different. Unlike photojournalism, where it is important to get the key shot of the event, you need to get a good shot of as many people as possible. For the people who buy the pictures, the person competing is the most important person in the event. So on a certain half-marathon, there might be 1,000 key events. What a challenge. My camera actually got hot one day.

The picture at the right is me photographing a soccer tournament in Overland Park.

Me in 1990

Heads bopping in time to the music, the audience listens intently at the Writer’s Place in Kansas City. It was a night where my friends played their music and read their poems to the members of this group. They used to be members and met there. I had never been there, but was intrigued by the stories, so despite the freezing fog and slippery roads we went.

It had the feel of an art gallery to me. An opening reception, where the people gather to give analysis to the art and talk about meanings, interpretations and things that one doesn’t talk about in normal everyday life. It brought back feelings of 20 years ago, I went to Chicago to study Art and Urban Culture. It was the first time I experienced that type of gathering.

Coming from a small town in Kansas, the urban art scene has always had some draw for me. I can’t believe it’s been 20 years since I worked for the Chicago Daily Defender, saw the Chicago Museum of Art and experienced first hand the interchange between black and white, poor and rich, art and urban.

This is the last weekend of January and the entry of a new decade. Each new decade has had new adventures for me. 1990, started pursuing photojournalism degree. 2000, moved back to Lawrence, without a job to come back to the art/music scene I loved as a student here. 2010, new opportunities await….

It has been a strange winter here in Kansas. We had a Christmas blizzard and the snow has continued into the new year. It is snowing right now. We don’t normally have quite this much snow on the ground for this long in a typical winter.

We’ve had some deer come up to the fence in our backyard. Unfortunately I haven’t gotten a good picture of them yet as they seem to come at dawn and dusk when there isn’t quite enough light.

I did however get a shot of one of the four cardinals that have also been frequenting the backyard.

While the snow falls, I’ve been working on a little redesign of Valsgallery.com. Watch for the launch in the coming weeks.

Happy New Year!

I really did! I couldn’t believe it when a person called me from Backpacker magazine. The phone number was 303… so this could be legit I thought, but I was kind of reserved. I didn’t whoop and holler, I told only a couple of people, thinking this could be a scam. Then a couple of days later, Nemo, the company who makes the tent I won, called me and said that I had won and that they wanted to confirm my address to ship it. Wait, this was starting to really sound legit. Still not wanting to get too excited though, I didn’t scream and shout.

However, it did prove to be legit when it arrived on the same day I got laid off from my job. I was surfing the internet for jobs and the FedEx guy came and handed me my tent. Whohoo!! It came on the right day, I needed that boost!

The next weekend was Labor Day weekend and we had a camping trip planed. The Nemo tent was easy to set up. It has more plastic parts, than my 10-year-old Kelty tent but the parts all seemed to be sturdy. It was easy to set up. One disappointment though, they provided some guy out ropes, but not enough stakes for the guy out ropes. Good thing I brought the Kelty tent, I could snarf some stakes from it.

Once the tent was set up, I was pleased with the amount of room inside. It fit two people and two small-medium sized dogs in there very comfortably. There was a large amount of headroom and the vestibules were large enough for packs and shoes. It breathed really well and no condensation built up on the inside. It was even easy to dump out the sand when packing it up.

One of the best features is the stuff sack, if you can call it that. You fold the tent into this pouch then wrap it up like a burrito. You roll it up, cinch up the straps and it is one small packed tent. Great for backpacking!

I also received an inflatable mattress. It is really nice, with two inflatable valves. It fit in my chair adapter thingy and filled nice and thick, I slept really well. For me though (I’ve been using a small 3/4 size Thermarest mattress) I think I’ll stick with my older one for backpacking type adventures. It fits in my pack much better. This one was a little bulky. However, it is a very nice product perfect for car camping adventures.

Here’s a photo of the tent. Thanks Nemo and Backpacker Magazine!

If you ever get a chance to go to a Busker festival, go. This was my second year attending the one in Lawrence Kan. and it was fun! There are all sorts of entertaining characters out on the street just to entertain you. This year, we saw some fiddling and picking, fire eating, magic, juggling, arial arobatics and more. I especially enjoyed the guy who I’m calling the Orb man. He could do all sorts of things with these clear balls that made them look like they were floating. There are some incredibly talented people performing at these things.

Orb man

I can’t believe summer has almost come to a close. We had a strange summer. The first strange thing happend when Racoons ate our first crop of corn. Then we had some bees make a nest in a blanket in one of the dog’s houses.

Battling the bees was fun. I was cleaning the patio when I discovered them. The dogs thought it was fun to try to catch them, but that seemed to aggrivate them and they got stung. So I bought some wasp spray and, at my Dad’s advice, a can soup can full of gasoline to pour on them. I was thinking I wanted to be as far away as possible, so I started with the wasp spray and sprayed the whole can on them. I krept closer and a couple of them were still moving, so I poured the gasoline on them and they seemed pretty immoble. The next morning they were pretty dead and we got a look at the hive they made. I had never seen a bumble bee nest, so it was pretty interesting.

Have any of you had interesting summer adventures?

I’ve been watching a lot of bike racing this month. Of course the Tour de France is on. I’ve been streaming it on the computer, so I haven’t blogged for a while.

The Tour of Lawrence was the fourth of July weekend. It was awesome! I had a lot of fun watching everyone race. I got some pictures too. Here are a couple.

We visited the Sedgewick County Zoo recently. It was a cool, and cloudy day with a few rain showers. The animals were out and pretty active. You can check out a few photos on my Flickr page. I love that Zoo. I’ve been going there since I was pretty young. It’s always fascinating how much it changes every couple of years.

It’s been super rainy here lately. We tried to plan a camping trip but, due to the rain, we decided it would be better to do something else. So we visited Wichita’s First Friday music crawl.

In an effort to combine my blogs, I thought I would review the new coffee/donut shop that I visited in Wichita.

We ended the First Friday music crawl with coffee and a donut from Donut Whole, http://www.thedonutwhole.com/. It was a great eclectic little shop, with great donuts and coffee. I had the regular bold brewed coffee and a chocolate donut.

This little shop has a great atmosphere, art and I’m sure music at times. They had a large stage. One of the features I particularly liked was an outlet at every booth. One of the things I find annoying is no outlets when wanting to work on my computer at a coffee shop.

If you’re in Wichita, visit this little place and let me know what you think. You can find it at 1720 E. Douglas.

I also wanted to put a note in about the Wichita First Friday Music Crawl. This is an interesting concept. It is like an art walk, except you pop into bars, coffee shops and hotel lobbies to hear music. It was a little awkward, as some of the places served food and wanted to put your name on the list, or sell you a drink. There didn’t seem to be a lot of people doing the pop in, listen to a few songs and move on thing like we wanted to do. I also think it would help to have some street performers, so that there would be more going on outside as people are walking to the different venues.

The idea of a music crawl definitely has some possibilities. I would like to visit it again in a couple months and see how it evolves.

More information: http://firstfriday.rokict.com/

It looks like spring has finally sprung here in Northeastern Kansas. It’s been teasing us with warm, cold, warm, cold weather. I took a picture of a small blooming tree here at work. Ah, nice to see some color finally popping out!

Also wanted to add, this was taken with my Fujifilm A345 digital camera. It is a small point and shoot. I just want to tell all you out there that you don’t need a fancy camera to shoot great pictures. Look for the great shot by experimenting and you’ll find it.

Keep shooting!