I hope you all are aware of this, but just in case you aren’t – Phil Parker and Mark Armstrong are back on the air on KFYR-AM 550 with their “P.M.S. in the Morning” show. It’s fun, it’s local, it’s clean, and for me it brings back very fond memories.
I put in around 14 years at KFYR-TV, and during a part of that we used to simulcast the Country Morning program from 6 to 6:30 every weekday morning. Al Gustin would go down the hall to the AM radio studio, where we had a couple of cameras, and the guys would bring their combination of local news and weather as well as a dose of frivolity for the last segment of the half-hour. It was a blast and a privilege.
One of Phil & Mark’s trademark contributions to the show was an intentionally low-budget “camcorder” segment where they’d take a VHS camcorder with them on visits to small town activities and then show portions of the resulting footage on the air. This was an homage to that shooting style. One morning I decided to grab my old VHS camcorder (this was twenty years ago, after all) and do a little “behind the scenes” segment for the program. I’d all but forgotten about it, but I came across it this week while I was going through some old tapes and thought I’d share:
Al has since retired from broadcasting, Phil and Mark are back on the air, I haven’t spoken to Crystal in a few months, Mike passed away several years ago, and Reed and I are out saving the world one day at a time. Even during my tenure at KFYR-TV I moved on from overnights and mornings, working primarily on video production work and the afternoon and evening newscasts. I’m glad I got to work on Country Morning when I did. Currently you can catch the same ol’ familiar spirit in the revived Phil & Mark Show, PMS in the Morning, even if only on the radio side of things. Be sure to give it a listen.
This is what I came up with in the morning. I was so pleased with the high, wispy clouds that I actually took some time to start framing and snapping instead of just scouting. I also took a little bit of time to check out the angles and see if it would work right:
This is the 
Then came the sunset. Sadly, as this location was well out of town, I missed the light I was hoping for by a mere five minutes or so. Despite that setback I was determined to come away with a shot I liked. As it turned out, having the sun absent made it a little easier to expose details in the shadows as well as the sky, and the clouds suddenly aligned in a symmetry that played very nicely off the reflective surface of the pond. I found myself okay with the fact that I’d missed the sun.
Going through some boxes of old books that my mom brought over from their house, I found these among the forgotten gems in those dusty old boxes. Pac Man themed Archie, a guide to defeating that darn Rubik’s Cube, and an orientation to my beloved Apple //c.
Pun intended. This was taken below Double Ditch recently as I took my sweetie and our little guys on a little adventure. On the one hand the clouds didn’t really light up with sunset colors the way I wanted, but on the other hand they were quite dramatic. I had a cool foreground and the colors of the waning sunset reflected brilliantly off the water. Not bad, after all. This is one of those that looked better at home than it did through the viewfinder.
One thing we’ve been short of lately is photogenic clouds. Ironically, those dry, hot August days haven’t been really conducive for great summer sunsets. In order for the sun to really provide a dramatic sunset, it needs some clouds to bounce its light, create shadows, and fill the sky with color. The other night we got just that kind of clouds.
The wispy tendrils of these clouds were of a type I haven’t seen in a while, so I was excited to bolt out to one of my frequent photo haunts to put them into perspective. Of course I used one of my favorite foreground features: an old windmill.
Now we have too many clouds to do much of a sunset photo at all, but the light rain is also a welcome sight. I didn’t get to chase sunsets much at all for most of this summer, and plan to do a lot more now that I’ve got the opportunity, so when the rainy days pass by I’m sure more shots like this will appear.
Years ago I spotted this truck along the walking trail on the west side of the Missouri. I started at the trailhead in the Captain’s Landing township and walked past this truck parked in someone’s backyard.
Naturally, something jumped out at me: a serious error in the word “Bismarck”. Since this wasn’t typed, I didn’t really call it a “typo”. I figured someone in the sign shop got a phone call after the first R or something. There obviously was no keyboard or computer on which to blame the error.
I’d often wondered what the other side of the truck looked like, but, not wanting to go rooting around in someone’s back yard, I figured I’d have to find out another day. That day came recently when, on another walk along the trail, I noticed that the truck had been moved out into the open. It was time to “innervestigate”, as Tigger says in my boys’ Winnie the Pooh books.
Both doors are significantly faded, but it’s easy to see that the other one contains Bismarck in its properly spelled form – 
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the alternate spelling of McKenzie Drive in southeast Mandan. This is the sign at the intersection just south of Moritz. How in the world did that go unnoticed for so long? I have no idea…I’d like to think strict vigilance to the traffic in my surroundings. Maybe the sign itself is a recent replacement, although the new ones are lowercase. I don’t know, but I spotted it this time.