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.

1. Mount the camera on a tripod on the roof of a store downtown.
2. Set the camera as an intervalometer to take one picture every minute for 24-hours.
3. Make the camera fire remotely, using pocket wizards.
4. Set the camera on P-mode. Set the white balance to cloudy.
5. Triple check your settings and mount, leave the camera on, wrap everything in plastic, and walk away.
6. Walk by at midnight and trip the camera mounted about 50-feet above the sidewalk using the remote trigger.
7. Come back the next day and collect your gear and completed time lapse.
8. Load the frames as a sequence into Quicktime Pro, and export to your desktop.

“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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

The society still opposes the roundups, but is no longer fighting them publicly.

“We gave it our best shot back in 1993,” Rundquist said.

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.

This weekend, Phil and I sat down to rethink, redesign and reevaluate both the Super Rat website and the future business model of Super Rat’s online operation. If you ride BMX, or are at all interested in online business, you should keep tabs on Super Rat Machine Works in the coming months. Just yesterday, we launched the new website, which uses Wordpress as the CMS and a modified version of my Monochrome theme that I sell at Graph Paper Press. You can expect some innovative products from Super Rat Machine Works in the coming months.

Note: Some of the ideas in this post build off of light diffusion ideas available at Strobist.

What you need:

• Cardboard Box
• White cellophane (trash bags work too)
• 11 x 17 white office paper
• Clear tape
• Box cutters (the terrorist-free kind)
• Three 60 watt lamps

1. Open the box
2. Cut away windows from three side of the box
3. Cut your white diffusion bag/cellophane/paper to fit the three windows
4. Tape the diffusion onto the three sides
5. Bend and tape the white paper to the bottom of the box, creating a seamless curve down onto the side of the box that was not cut.
6. Set up the three lights, one on each side of the translucent white diffusion panels on the lightbox.
7. Set your camera’s white balance on the incandescent setting (the light bulb).
8. If shooting small products (lets say less than 6 inches tall), then set your camera on macro focus
9. Start shooting

Total construction time: 15 minutes
This won’t win you the Pulitzer Prize, but it might earn you some sales.

During the month of December I…

1. Traveled to Atlanta for three days for a photo shoot
2. Traveled to Minneapolis for Christmas
3. Worked well over 160 hours at my 9-5
4. Designed and launched Graph Paper Press
5. Designed and launched four Wordpress theme designs for Wordpress
6. Hosted two small “get togethers” with friend and family
7. Photographed a friend’s wedding in Kansas City
8. And finally, I raked my yard. Yikes!

Yes, I’m tired. But, I’ve never been more excited about life, work and what I like to refer to as “play work.” Luckily, I received the Tolstoy of all phones for Christmas: The iPhone. It’s proving to help keep me organized, on top of email, and constantly distracted. So, in the mean time, take a peek at a few of the things I’ve produced during the tale end of 2007:

1. My 2007 Year in Pictures at the Lawrence Journal-World
2. Graph Paper Press
3. A few photos from my friend’s wedding

Here’s to a less manic 2008!