The Rolling Exhibition

I like stories. I like photography. I like photographs that tell stories. Kevin Connolly has one heck of a story to tell. Kevin was born without legs. He gets around just fine, typically preferring a skateboard to a wheelchair. Wherever he goes, though, he attracts a fair degree of attention. People stare. One day, Kevin decided to stare back. With a camera. The picture that resulted was more interesting than he had planned, and it spurred Kevin onto a massive project. He ended up touring 15 countries and taking over 30,000 pictures of people staring. The results said very little about a man with no legs, and a whole lot about humanity. The stares were essentially the same no matter where he went. But the stories that people built were very different. Some assumed he was a war veteran, some saw him as a holy man, other saw a beggar. Our commonality and our cultural differences both emerge from the same collection of photos. An excellent article on Kevin the Christian Science Monitor can be found here. And his gallery can be found here. Check it out.

Final picture

Here is the final picture from the advent series.

Advent 3

The overdue third photograph in this series: I'll post the fourth and final image tomorrow.

He said what?!

This always amuses me. If you know who Phil Keaggy is, it will probably amuse you too: (The album in question is instrumental.)

What have I done?

I signed up for the 2008 Cooper River Bridge Run, which is a 10K held in Charleston on April 5. And I signed up in the category that says I can do it in less than an hour. Now that's not very fast. And 10K isn't really all that far. But it is farther than I've ever run at once. Plus I have a tendency to get repetitive stress injuries when I try to start running, so the idea of building up to a respectable 10K time in 11 ½ weeks is a little daunting. So, this time I'm going to play it smart. I'm going to do my level best to stick with the program that's in the Beginning Runner's Handbook (which I picked up at a used bookstore some time ago). It's a 13 week program, so I'll have to modify it slightly, but it builds up nice and gradually into a 10K run. It's hard to hold back at the beginning (my lungs, heart, and the majority of my muscle groups are asking me to go faster), but I think that if I plan wisely and stay the course I'll actually be ready for race time. Perhaps there is a metaphor for life in all of this?

Site business

I have another real post in the works, but these are a couple of quick notes about the site: You should probably update your links to the site to http://www.jeromierand.com. The old address will continue to work for the forseeable future, but this is the "real" address now.  I did this for two reasons: One day I hope to have a little more than just the blog here (such as a selection of my favorite photography), and I didn't like the name Kamikaze Christian anymore. By having my blog at jeromierand.com, I can change the title of the blog without worrying about the address being outdated. I'm pretty sure that my name is going to stick with me for a while. For any friends who have done graphic design: I know that Papyrus is overused. I will not leave it in the header image, but I couldn't find anything else right now so I'm running with it. Please don't kill me in my sleep. Do you have any suggestions for fonts that would match the hand drawn style (because I actually did hand draw, scan, and convert to black and white) of the header image?

Oh. Shit.

Liz and I headed out the door early this morning to take the final picture for the DCF advent series. We went out to Eden Farms for a sunrise shot. On the way back, I stopped to take a few extra photos. Even with the presence of the power lines (maybe because of them), I like this shot: When we were reviewing them at home, Liz informed me that the big pile of dirt underneath the tower in the center is not, in fact, dirt. It's where Eden Farms dumps the excess manure that can't be used for fertilizer. Oh. Shit.