Bowhunters and Cotton

So, if you're wondering what 51p5-60-1 bow hutners, 3-deck means, you're not the only one! Apparently, the PDF version of today's news was uploaded without this story actually being put in there yet, hence the jibberish headline and all the latin-sounding text for a story. I only hope that they didn't print the newspaper like this. Spent a couple hours at this bowhunters convention and a lot of people were wanting to buy a copy of today's paper before heading back to Salina, Wichita, Ellsworth, KC, Hays, other places, and it would really be sad if the paper they got had this about their convention.

There was a cool photo of a guy skinning the head of a deer that the editor pulled out.. guess it was too gruesome for paper. I put in like 11 photos from this event even though they were only gonna use 2-3. I had fun. It shoulda be the Ad Astra I guess. Then Darcy wouldn'tve had to do a story. She was pretty busy yesterday.

More importantly, spent quite a bit of time at the KSHSAA 5A State Wrestling Tournament at the Salthawk Activity Center this weekend, about 6 hours per day, and had this Ad Astra in today's paper.

The biggest deal for us was Romero Cotton, Hutchinson High School senior wrestler, who, last night, won his fourth consecutive state title after an undefeated season. It was my mission last night to get pictures of his family, the Cottons, cheering for him during and after his match. It just so happens, at the critical cheer moment when Romero won the match, Uncle Charles popped up to cheer directly in front of Romero's parents and made it rather difficult to get a shot with all their faces.
These down here were pretty old, but they finally ran in a a Business section today.

-TB

Colbert guitar!

I got this idea yesterday when I was talking to my fiance on the phone and I took off this little sticker that's been on my JReynolds Fender Strat lookalike guitar for a really long time and it left a little sticky spot right under the strings on the pickguard, because thats where it was, and I thought "that sucks, I need to put another sticker on there!" and for some reason I thought an American flag would be the best thing, since I'm a proud American and I was thinking of somewhere I could get a star-spangled sticker of some kind and Colbert's book I AM AMERICA came to mind.

After flipping through the pages for something funny and easily removable, I had the crazy idea to cut out the first and last pages, the ones with the red and blue 'facing Stephens' pattern all over them and I thought hell I could probably cover the whole pickguard with that stuff. Bitchin! So that's what I ended up doing!

I cut those pages out of colbert's book and took the originally all-white pickguard off and cut the shape into the pages and used lots of really smooth and tight packing tape to secure it piece by piece and all the way around the edges, to the bottom of it. It's actually two large pieces, half the pickguard covered with one page. And then i had to cut and tape down Stephen around the inside edges of all the holes for the knobs and the pickups and poke holes for all the screws.

The pickups originally had white covers on them but the fit was a little too snug with them on so I left them off and decided they look just as good black. The pickguard is completely coated with smooth packing tape to make sure I don't rip the Colbert paper while thrashing away on mad licks and riffs and jams and rock ftw.

-TOM!

PS: I will be sure to purchase an extra, un-desecrated copy of I AM AMERICA (AND SO CAN YOU!) to go up on a pedestal, to make sure not to anger Colbert with my unapproved cutting of material from the book.

recap

Ok. I haven't been putting my work up here everyday like I should be, but all this Vicodin I'm taking for my aching gall bladder has me kinda losing track of things. I have been working. I don't think I'm going to have many posts this week as I am going home to ILLINOIS Sunday evening to have SURGERY on Monday. I will then recover at home for the rest of the week and return to KANSAS next SUNDAY. It will SUCK losing a week's worth of pay, but my good health comes before my ability to pay bills, and if the surgery helps me as much as I think it is going to, I should have had it a LONG time ago.

So, these are some of the images I've had in the paper this last week.

Also, I got the Best of Colbert Report DVD today from Netflix, so I'm going to have something entertaining to watch all week while I'm recovering from being under the knife!

-TB

gallstones!

So, I was having a lot of stomach pain this week. It was a hard wrenching and burning pain in the right side of my abdomen and it hurt so much that i vomited a few times from it and i went to the bathroom lots but it didnt make the pain go away. So I went to a Same Day Care clinic at the Hutchinson Clinic here in town and Dr. Thode says 'sounds like gall bladder problems to me' and they hook me up to an IV and they draw blood and pump painkillers into me and put me to sleep and woke me up for an ultrasound and I fell asleep again and then they woke me up again and said I have gallstones! Medium-sized ones. Several of them.

I have three different medications now: Hydrocodone (vicodin), Levaquin (antibiotic), and Ursodiol, which dissolves gallstones, but it can take months for it to actually work. I think Dr. Thode is planning for me to have a surgery to have my gallbladder removed soon, because he only gave me 10 days worth of ursodiol. While I am thinking it would be nice to get my gallbladder removed, I dont think i want to have it done while I'm out here in Kansas. Of course, if the killer pain continues even with medication, I might have to. My mom had hers removed when she was 21 and my dad when he was 23, so I think it's partially a genetic thing to have gallstones in my family. Also, obesity and rapid weight loss help form gallstones because with both you have too much cholesterol in your bile.

I'm just going to take lots of pills and stay away from cholesterol and fats and hope that i get to feeling better long enough to get back to Illinois and have my gall bladder removed while I'm home.

That's what's new with Tom today. I was asleep just about all day and all night yesterday. I'm going to work today I think, probably an 11-8 kind of thing. I hope the vicodin I just took doesn't knock me out. Especially while I'm driving...

TB

PS: Here's a silly anecdote. After my dad's mom died in 1995 or 94 or one of those years, we had all of the stuff from her house in our garage. It sucked cuz we had usually parked cars in there, but for the time being, we had lots of furniture and boxes of granny stuff. One day, when we were going through the stuff, we found a little wooden box labeled 'Kathryn Barker - Gallstone" and sure as shoot, there was a dirty gallstone the size of a walnut sitting inside it.

gameday

Photo by DuVale Riley/Daily Egyptian
They had a cool ESPN Gameday broadcast at the Salukis bball game Saturday. I hope they do better than sweet 16 this year. Wish I was there to shoot the games. Not really though because I'm getting better pay and shooting lots of basketball out here, and i dont have to be in classes.

TB

HCC

Had a couple basketball photos in the paper today. They came out pretty red. They even look really red on here. Not sure why. I guess I just get so wrapped up trying to fix the toning on pictures after converting them to CMYK that my eyes forget what the photos're supposed to look like sometimes.
I got to drive around a bit today and take some wild art photos. There were a couple of phonecalls reporting that geese were frozen in ice on a lake and I went to take some pictures, but I don't think they were actually frozen there. There were like a thousand geese out there and I think they were just sitting on the ice. None of them were panicking or anything. Other than that, I mostly worked up photos for Sunday's Ad Astra about the Daisy Princess Party.

Tonight I'm going to shoot wrestling at HHS.

I miss Amber.

TB

under construction

So, I'm not sure how often I'm going to be posting pictures on here anymore. I had to take some off that I had posted which hadn't run in the paper yet, which won't be running in the paper for like a month. I'll be able to post pictures like the last ones as they are in the newspaper, the day of or after they've run in the paper. So. Today, I didn't have any photos in the paper, and there won't be any photos on here today. I didn't work Monday or Tuesday. Today, I worked. Tomorrow I'll have a few basketball photos in the paper, because I shot a couple Hutch Community College basketball games today. It was nice, I got to use strobes mounted in the ceiling and shoot perfectly-exposed, well-lit photos at 1/250th, f/5.6, 200 ISO.

That's it.

TB

TB

a home to call her own

I worked up these photos yesterday for today's paper. Also I went to wal-mart last night and i bought a box of thin spaghetti and some ragu sauce and I cooked the spaghetti and put sauce on it and ate it and it was amazing. only 240ish calories too!


Also, I went to a basketball game last night at McPherson High School and they have the craziest most amazing gymnasium for a high school I have ever seen. It's cooler than SIU's gym, just not as much seating.


I got to sit at the fancy little press table with the little HutchNews laptop and transmit photos back to the office at halftime. Then I didn't even have to edit them, or even go back to the office, it was cool.

Also, I bought the Family Guy Blue Harvest dvd and watched it.

TB

293

So I got on the scale this morning and it said 291.6. I thought, that can't be right, there's no way i could lose 4-5 pounds in a day, and I scooted the scale over a little bit a re-weighed a few times and the scale is meant to handle 400 pounds so I'm sure I haven't broken it or anything and then it said 293.0. I tried again, it said 293.0. and again, just to be sure. I'm down to 293 pounds! 13 lbs. down from my start weight!

Also I finally went running again today. I didnt go the last two days cuz it was really snowy and there was like 5-degree wind chills. Today it was 33 with a windchill of 20 some, so I went in double layers. Two running pants, a running jacket, a sweatshirt, a fuzzy hat, and gloves, and it was still pretty cold the first half of the loop. Winds were about 27mph.

I took a bunch of pictures yesterday that i didn't blog about. I think im going to start blogging photos only on the days theyre running in the paper, instead of beforehand. I'm not sure if I'll run into trouble posting photos that technically the Hutchinson News owns before they've run them in the newspaper. So, for instance, today I should post two basketball photos and the photo of the "Energy Czar", because that's what in today's paper.

Of course, I can talk all I want about the shooting I did. Yesterday, I went to a recovering meth addicts house who's been through three marriages and has a kid who was a meth addict and she worked with a realtor guy who's also a detective for the state police who got her her house when she never thought she'd be able to own one. It was actually a really nice house for its size. All remodeled, nice floors, huge ass kitchen and a pond in the fenced-in backyard.

That's about it for now. It's about noon and im going to eat my salad and go to work at 1. adios.

TB

TUESDAY-I get my first check tomorrow.

I got to go to a construction site today where they're building a new VA clinic thing place. Actually their just framing it right now and there's a group of guys called Mertens Bros. Construction who were doing the framing and their names are Leo (above), Les (below left), and Ronald (below right), Mertens.

Nice guys. Took the photos for a story about the new place possibly running on Thursday. Here's some more pictures from that:

There's bad sensor dust in that one (^) . I didnt feel like editing it out. Also, it's cool to have dust on your sensor. Everyone's doing it. My popularity = skyrocketed.

This guy's name is Doug Pack. He's not one of the Mertens Brothers. He's from a company called Rosa's Drywall who is bidding to do the drywall job on the place after it's been all framed and stuff. He was walking around taking lots of little measurements and marking things with his pencil.

Also today, I got to drive around a company car! There's like four of em and theyre all Mazda 3's and theyre fun to drive and hopefully I can drive them more often so I don't have to use my gas and get reimbursed for it. I took the car home and then to a basketball tournament in a town with a really awesome high school called HALSTEAD.

ZOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! And then I had basketball pictures. Two in the paper tomorrow (the top two):


I did quite a bit of experimenting during the basketball games. I first took pictures with my 70-200 on my 1D with two Pocketwizarded flashes. Then I took pictures with my 17-35 on my 20D with the pop-up flash (above) and I also took pictures with my manual focus 50 1.4 on both my 20D and my 1D and THEN I took pictures onmy 20D with the 70-200 with no flash at all. So i had lots of different looking pictures.
Also, this picture was in the paper today for a story about reusable shopping bags. I took it at walmart. I also took pictures of cashiers bagging stuff, but they didnt use any of those. I got lots of funny looks from people.
Finally, I put these items up for sale on SPORTSSHOOTER.COM! You can't see them because it's a member-only listing, unless of course youre a sportsshooter member, but I did it after I decided a few things: 1.) I need a 1.4x teleconverter, not a 2x (middle), 2.) I don't use my 85 and it's good for about $300 I could use to get a better lens I would use (right), and 3.) I need to get rid of this Tamron lens (left) and replace it with CANON L GLASS, e.g. Canon 17-40 f/4 L. So, if it all sells, I'm looking at about $950. The perfect amount to buy myself a 24-70 f/2.8L, one of the 4 lenses I could ever need and one I would use for everything. DAMN IT THE TRAINS IN HUTCHINSON ARE SO DAMN LOUD. I mentioned in my classified that I'm hoping to save for a 24-70 and/or a mk2 camera.

My classified read:

I'm a Southern Illinois student interning in Hutchinson, KS and I've got a couple things I don't use too much anymore that I would like to get rid of to make way for bigger and better things. Canon 2x II EF Extender: $225 shipped. Good condition, used occasionally for college sports, would like to replace it with a 1.4x. Accepting trades. Canon 85 f/1.8 USM: $300 shipped. Like new condition, perfect glass. Extremely sharp lens. Bought last year and used for portraits. Can't even feel the thing focus. Comes with Hood. Tamron 17-35 f/2.8-4: $375 shipped. Bought new from Calumet two summers ago and have used it on nearly every assignment since. Still clean and sharp. I'm wanting to replace it with Canon L glass. Didn't have money for Canon glass at the time, but have been very happy with this lens. Great for student or low budget. Sells on KEH used for $499. Trying to save up enough to buy a 24-70 2.8 and/or a MkII. Student wages and car payments don't help out too much! Additional photos available, just ask. Will ship to ContUS. I'll accept just about anything that counts as money in the US.

Oh, that's cool, it pasted with a little box around it. Isn't the internet neat!

The interesting part is, I got a response. I got an email from a guy stating:

Thomas,
I've got a 24-70f2.8 Canon USM and a MII listed for sale
in the classifieds. If you're interested, email me and
we'll work something out. I'm more than willing to do
something for a fellow SS.com member.

And I live in Iowa...not Dubai :) :) :)

Good luck on your sale.

Michael

"Work something out." Isn't that interesting? I emailed him back asking what he had in mind and explaining my financial situation and I've yet to hear from him, but it would be very VERY exciting if I could get a 24-70 and a mk2 from him with the money I could get from these items as some kinda downpayment or something. Who knows? It's happened before, I got my 1D from paying $600 initially and then $650 a month later. Good ole 2003 Taco Bell shift manager money.

Oh well, guess we'll wait and see. I get to work 9-6 tomorrow instead of 1-10pm so I'll actually have an evening without basketball games maybe! That's exciting too!

TB

PS: In case you're curious, the four lenses that I could ever need are:
1. Canon 16-35 2.8L ($950)
2. Canon 24-70 2.8L($950)
3. Canon 70-200 2.8L ($950) -currently owned
4. Canon 300 2.8 L ($3500) -that one's a ways off.

ffx297huckawalmart

Well on my two days off this week, I beat Ghost Recon Advanced Warfigher 2 for the ps3, a game Amber's parents got me for Christmas. It's pretty cool, sometimes it's a pain in the ass to get your tank to do what the hell you want it to, but it's a fun game. I put my life on the line to stop Mexican terrorists from launching a nuclear missile from El Paso. Fun. Also I beat the Mile High Club mission on COD4, which I talked about in the previous post. AND , I started a new game of Final Fantasy X! I played it a long time ago and never actually finished it, so I think I'll play it all the way through this time, as something to do in my free time.

Also, I'm gonna see if there are any awesome red and blue jackets at wal-mart that are good for running in and I'm gonna get one and then have the words 'RUN FOR HUCKABEE' put on the back of it and wear it while I run. I bet I'll get on the news and Mike Huckabee will come to Kansas and shake my hand.

Also, I weighed 297.0 pounds today! That's 9 pounds lost! I started dieting on the 4th or the 5th! Thats 10 days! I'm off to a good start I think! As long as I keep it up.

Final also, even though it's my day off, I'm probably gonna have to go in to work in a while and put in some pictures I took at Wal-Mart the other day about people using or not using the reusable black canvas shopping bags. I took pictures of the bags and got pictures of a cashier putting peoples stuff into their cart with regular walmart bags. I'm not really sure what the story is about, I just know it has to do with those reusable bags. Pretty much all the walmart cashiers and customer service people know me as a news photographer now, though. Also, lots of Kansans gave me weird looks while I was standing there taking pictures of the checkout lanes.

TB

BOWLYA GRANDMA!

I DID IT! After 3 hours of trying once again to beat the epilogue mission on call of duty 4 called 'MILE HIGH CLUB' on the hardest difficulty, a.ka. VETERAN, I DID IT! And this is proof! I'm the man! I dont ever have to try it again!! Buwahwhaha! all that pissedoffness and saying of the F word! It all paid off!


TB

today

Main image on today's front page. I had a couple basketball pictures in today's paper also that I took last night. They weren't all too spectacular. I probably won't put them on here. I'ts 1013am and i havent run yet. I'm going to go run....

TB