Telly Awards
In a sign of the changing times, a photographer shares in winning television awards…..Go figure.
I shared in two Telly Awards for photographs and video produced for Free State Studios, a division of The World Company, which also owns the Lawrence Journal-World and Sunflower Broadband. The awards program, now in its 29th year, honors video and film productions, amongst other things. The program presents Silver and Bronze awards. The two shows that received the awards are:
- “From Farm to Fork,†an episode of “Jayni’s Kitchen,†won a Silver Telly, the program’s highest honor.
- “Mining: A Scar on Kansas,†an episode of “River City Weekly,†won a Bronze Telly.
In all, Free State Studios took home three awards. More info can be found at LJWorld.com.
Mining’s Legacy: A Scar on Kansas
This in-depth multimedia report explores how coal, lead and zinc mining in southeast Kansas left the land and local residents scarred and poisoned with pollutants. The report garnered the top prize in the 2007 Associate Press Managing Editors Online Convergence Award. After Mining’s Legacy was published, state and federal officials began looking for solutions to Southeast Kansas’ mining-related problems. More information about the project is available here.
24 Hour Time Lapse
This 24-hour time-lapse of downtown Lawrence, Kan. captures Massachusettes Street from midnight of May 10 to midnight of May 11, 2007. Here is how the project unfolded:
- Mount the camera on a tripod on the roof of a store downtown.
- Set the camera as an intervalometer to take one picture every minute for 24-hours.
- Make the camera fire remotely, using pocket wizards.
- Set the camera on P-mode. Set the white balance to cloudy.
- Triple check your settings and mount, leave the camera on, wrap everything in plastic, and walk away.
- Walk by at midnight and trip the camera mounted about 50-feet above the sidewalk using the remote trigger.
- Come back the next day and collect your gear and completed time lapse.
- Load the frames as a sequence into Quicktime Pro, and export to your desktop.
Zapatistas
Kansas Rattlesnake Roundup
“Boy, they’re hot today,†the veteran snake handler from Texas said as he worked the snake pit.
It was 91 degrees, the hottest day of the year so far in Sharon Springs. The rattlers weren’t happy.
“Come on fellas, cooperate,†White said as he nudged them with his boot, trying to get them to strike. White and three handlers, known as the Fangs and Rattlers, were circling in a pit filled with 135 rattlesnakes gathered from various parts of western Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas for the 13th annual Rattlesnake Roundup in Sharon Springs.
The two-day festival, held May 7 and 8 in Wallace County on the Colorado border, is the only one of its kind in Kansas. It attracts snake hunters, reptile lovers and adventurers looking to spend a weekend with one of the West’s most storied predators.
White, 56, was married in a snake pit in Onaga, and has been handling rattlers for 48 years. He holds a world record for dangling 10 rattlers from his mouth at one time. He’s only been bitten once.
The announcer proclaimed White “the oldest and the best snake handler ever.â€
In the early afternoon, groups of snake hunters slithered into the festival sunburned and dehydrated. They had spent the morning chasing rattlers around prairie dog towns, home of the snakes’ favorite meal. Scott Plankenhorn, from Sublette, and his snake hunting buddy Kenny Fields, from Garden City, unloaded their buckets filled with 45 prairie rattlers into the Fangs and Rattlers’ snake pit. They caught the bulk of their snakes near Garden City.
“We hunt rattlesnakes for relaxation,†said Plankenhorn, a foreman in a feed yard.
Plankenhorn and Fields sold their catch to Judie Withers, a local dealer and the roundup’s organizer, for $3.50 per pound. They pocketed about $150. Withers said she planned to sell the 135 rattlers she bought at the roundup to a buyer in Colorado Springs, Colo. The buyer cans the snake meat and makes wallets, boots, purses and other fashion accessories from snake skin.
A few choice rattlers, typically the larger western diamondback species, were taken to a small shed at the festival called the “processing center.†The snakes were butchered and the raw meat sold at a nearby booth. Deep fried rattler was for sale at the booth.
Withers estimated the show drew 2,000 people, more than doubling the town’s population that weekend.
“No vacancy†signs were lit up on all three motels along U.S. Highway 40 in Sharon Springs. Without the roundup, Sharon Springs might dry up and fade away, Withers said.
“We’re a poor county,†she said, “and we didn’t have anything going on here.â€
Drought and increasing competition from corporate farming operations have dealt many western Kansas farmers and ranchers a huge economic blow. Withers said residents in Wallace County were seeking ways to reinvent themselves and explore new ways of generating revenue.
“We needed something to help the local economy,†she said.
When Withers was told by a friend about roundups in Texas and Oklahoma, she passed along the idea for a similar event in Sharon Springs to local officials. Led by then-state Sen. Sheila Frahm from Colby, legislation was soon passed in Topeka to allow the commercial harvest of rattlesnakes. The bill enabled the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks to issue rattlesnake hunting, dealer and buyer licenses for only the western third of Kansas.
“This is something Kansas City, Topeka and Wichita can’t touch,†Withers said.
The Kansas Herpetological Society, an organization dedicated to conserving and increasing awareness of amphibians and reptiles, opposed the bill. The society called the roundups “cruel, destructive and dangerous.â€
Eric Rundquist, an animal science technician at Kansas University, researches prairie rattlesnakes in Barber County, along the Oklahoma border.
“The population of rattlesnakes in western Kansas took a huge nosedive 12 years ago,†Rundquist said. Though the cause for the decline is unknown, he said, the roundups certainly don’t help.
“For them,†Rundquist said, “it’s strictly economics.â€
The society still opposes the roundups, but is no longer fighting them publicly.
“We gave it our best shot back in 1993,†Rundquist said.
Graph Paper Press
Graph Paper Press is an online side project of mine that happened by total accident. When I began the arduous task of updating my photography Web site in 2002, I didn’t realize that I was about to embark on a never-ending journey into the bowels of the internet.
After experimenting with countless content management systems to run www.thadallender.com, I finally discovered Wordpress. At the time, Wordpress didn’t accomplish what was required for managing a growing photography, video, and multimedia Web site. So, I began to tinker…and tinker…and tinker…and, well, you get where I’m going.
Because of Wordpress, my photography Web site began to reach an entirely new audience of readers who liked how I had tweaked my site. I decided to release my first public Wordpress theme, Visualization, and soon thereafter, I launched Graph Paper Press in December of 2007 to house most of my Wordpress-related activities. At the core, Graph Paper Press focuses on creating graphically minimal, content-rich designs that provide readers with multiple entry points to access content of all shapes and sizes.
