Taste of Colorado – For The Denver Post
Posted on 06. Sep, 2010 by Nathan W. Armes in blog: on assignment
Thousands of people braved the unusually high temperatures Sunday afternoon to pay a visit to the festivities at the Taste of Colorado currently underway at Civic Center Park in downtown Denver. I’m heading back today to grab food on a stick.
Cheers,
Nathan W. Armes
Denver Photographer & Photojournalist
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Steve Patterson – For The Wall Street Journal
Posted on 04. Sep, 2010 by Nathan W. Armes in blog: on assignment
Steve Patterson, CEO and co-founder of Colorado based, Broadnet LLC.
Cheers,
Nathan W. Armes
Denver Photographer & Photojournalist
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Getting Organized With Evernote
Posted on 30. Aug, 2010 by Nathan W. Armes in blog: on assignment
I am one of the most unorganized people I know. The polar opposite of everyone in my family. Over the past few years I have slowly gotten remarkably better at organizing my life.
As my professional career has become busier and clients become higher profile and demanding working more organized and efficiently has become a characteristic that I’m striving to perfect and master. I used to look at those highly organized people as freaks of nature, now I look at those same folks as forces of nature set to take over the world with the help of a color coded binder and meticulously dated notebooks.
In talking to and reading about these forces of nature a common story thread shines through; living life as a highly organized person and business owner is very hard work, it did not happen over night and no they were not born carrying a day planner.
You have to find a system that works for you and your business first – and that system is very rarely made up of random scraps of paper, cocktail napkins or the back of your ink stained hand filled with email addresses, important contact info and dates.
The first step I took was to get rid of the clutter. If you work from home, such as I do many days out of the week, that clutter included junk surrounding my desk and work space. I use the term junk loosely because anything that is a distraction – squirrel – is considered junk in my book. Get rid of the junk to find the focus that is needed to become organized.
Organized people are more likely to be focused people, read type A.
In ridding my workspace of clutter (which to many still looks like a hodgepodge of pictures, books and nicknacks but I find focus in items that inspire me creatively and professionally) I found lost business cards, old notes and a variety of calendars from earlier attempts to get myself organized.
I simply made a ‘to the dump’ pile and a ‘keep’ pile and worked from there. Filing, sorting and cleaning took about a week and is still looked upon with a touch of distain from my highly organized girlfriend.
One of the tools I use on a daily basis is a program called Evernote. It’s free and available for most every computer operating system and mobile device.
I use Evernote to organize my ideas, things I’ve read online and keep a ‘To Do’ list current. All of this content syncs and when you leave for the day you have a nice neat pile of your ever growing digital life in your pocket.
Here is a screen shot of my Evernote running on my MacBook Pro, you can click on it for larger view.
If you guys have issue with your site on mine. I will take this down, but gees I'm just talking about digging your work.
The folks at Evernote make it easy to grab stuff from the web and add to your notebooks. For example, when I read an interesting topic online and I think that it would make a good story down the road I use the Evernote plugin for Safari, see below.
The little elephant icon (get it, Evernote remembers all your stuff for you. Elephants never forget.) Geeky awesomeness, right? Well, you click the icon and Evernote, which I keep running in the background, automatically grabs three important pieces of information. One, the URL. Two, the title of the post, story, etc. and finally a screen shot of the website.
As you can see, I get real creative with my notebook titles such as ‘Story Ideas’ or ‘Marketing Notes’ – super creative….
The screenshot above is a list of photographers that I’ve been digging on their work as of late.
Sure, technology will not solve all of your organizational problems but for the creative professional to have a simple and easy to use tool to keep their ideas in a safe and highly organized place is a good step.
I’m no Evernote expert by any means, but if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment or find me on Twitter at @Nathan_Armes or you can email me. All the cool kids use Twitter though…
Good luck!
Cheers,
Nathan W. Armes
Denver Photographer & Photojournalist
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Mad About Mushrooms – For The Denver Post
Posted on 25. Aug, 2010 by Nathan W. Armes in blog: on assignment
VIA The Denver Post:
Britt Bunyard was on the hunt, picking his way through a stand of lodgepole pine, knife in one hand and a red-and- white polka-dotted basket in the other.
In an instant — it’s always in an instant for the stalker and the stalked — Bunyard spied his quarry, splayed before him on the ground.
“Ah, this is what I’ve been looking for,” he said. “Laccaria. Look, dozens of them.”
Bunyard pointed at an array of copper- tinted mushrooms dotting the tawny duff of the forest floor. In a flash, one was dug up and deposited in his basket.
For Bunyard, it was one of the sundry triumphs at the North American Mycological Association’s 50th Anniversary Foray, held earlier this month at Snow Mountain Ranch, 4 miles north of Tabernash.
You can read the rest of Bill Porter’s article on here.
The evening before I was to hike in the woods, with mushroom hunters in search of fungi, I decided to drag my light gear out and maybe work on a series of portraits of the hunters. According to the photo editor this would be a quirky group of folks – who did turn out to be quirky but extremely welcoming to this interloper. Nice, but honestly the thought of eating mushrooms, as food, truly gross me out.
Visions of decked out fungi hunters danced in my imagination.
I should have figured that something too perfect might go down in flames. After shooting my assignment for The Denver Post I set up a ’studio’ in the lobby of the hotel that most of the hunters were staying in.
My plan was to catch the flow of fungi folks as they walked into the hotel and capture their portrait – with the help of a ’seemless’ – as they exited the bus that transported them to and from the woods where the forays were happening.
Fungus did not ruin my grand idea only rotten logistics and bad information regarding the time the next busload of North American Mycological Association members would show up.
An hour went by.
Then an hour and a half. I really wish that bus would have showed up.
All I have to show for it is the following images. The first, taken as a setup shot for the awesome blog post I was writing in my head about the awesome portrait series I was getting ready to tackle.
So, yeah.
Cheers,
Nathan W. Armes
Denver Photographer & Photojournalist
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Lives Torn Apart – Survivor’s Stories Part IV of IV
Posted on 23. Aug, 2010 by Nathan W. Armes in blog: on assignment
Hurricane Katrina ripped homes from their foundations, trees from the ground and lives apart. Over the next few days I will recap three stories from Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, which felt the full force of the storm.
Thursday Aug. 19: 5 Year Anniversary of Katrina
Today, Friday Aug. 20: Chris Steiner – Waveland, Miss.
Saturday Aug 21: Deborah & David Burgess – Bay St. Louis, Miss.
Sunday Aug 22: . Rebecca McIntosh & Kathy Everard – Waveland, Miss.
VIA The Hickory Daily Record. September 11, 2005
When Rebecca McIntosh, 17, smiles, her braces add to the innocent aura that surrounds her. Smiles have not come easy for the teenager since Hurricane Katrina struck. Smiles have not come easy since she began digging out pieces of her life from the ruins of home.
A few days after Hurricane Katrina decimated large chunks of the Gulf Coast, McIntosh, along with her grandmother, Kathy Everard, drove from Picayune, La., to survey the damage to their home. It was not what they expected.
McIntosh recounts climbing over debris fields that were once her neighborhood. She found her home a short time later.The roof to her grandmother’s house in the next lot. Her stuffed animals litter the ground.
Her hands are dirty and her boots are caked with dark, thick mud.
In the shade of what trees are left standing the mud is slick and full of bacteria from ruptured sewer lines and decaying organic matter.
It’s hard to image that a 17-year-old can hold up a mud-caked porcelain doll and still smile.
They both can be thankful they are alive, but they’re also thankful for two members of the Rowan County (N.C.) Sheriff’s Office, Maj. Tim Bost and Capt. Ronnie Terry. The department was assigned to patrol the area in and around Bay St. Louis and Waveland, Miss.
The two officers stopped by the pair’s home on a routine patrol and asked if they needed cold water to drink. Terry washed Everard’s hands with a bottle of water and gave her hand sanitizer and a pair of latex gloves. Then he washed McIntosh’s hands. In the middle of a flattened neighborhood, where so many have suffered, the act of one human washing another’s hands steals the breath.
As the Rowan Country officers walked away from the home, Bost paused and put his arm around McIntosh.
“You remind me of my little girl,” he says as his voice trembled.
His arm dropped back down to his side and he walked back to his vehicle to help more victims like McIntosh and Everard.
Cheers,
Nathan W. Armes
Denver Photographer & Photojournalist
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Lives Torn Apart – Survivor’s Stories Part III of IV
Posted on 21. Aug, 2010 by Nathan W. Armes in blog: on assignment
Hurricane Katrina ripped homes from their foundations, trees from the ground and lives apart. Over the next few days I will recap three stories from Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, which felt the full force of the storm.
Thursday Aug. 19: 5 Year Anniversary of Katrina
Today, Friday Aug. 20: Chris Steiner – Waveland, Miss.
Saturday Aug 21: Deborah & David Burgess – Bay St. Louis, Miss.
Sunday Aug 22: . Rebecca McIntosh & Kathy Everard – Waveland, Miss.
VIA The Hickory Daily Record. September 11, 2005
For two days Deborah Burgess slept with a decorative hatchet beside her bed.
She got it from an artist friend in New Mexico. It’s sharp but was never intended to be used as a weapon to ward off looters or attackers that Deborah believed roamed the streets. Soon after Hurricane Katrina swept into Bay St. Louis, Miss., Burgess was left alone when her husband, David, hitchhiked into Mobile, Ala., to try to find supplies and water.
“I don’t know if we’ve ever been so isolated,” says Deborah.
The couple’s house sits just beyong a seawall at approximately 22 feet above sea level. They tried to leave, but Interstate 10 East was closed because the roads out of town had flooded with water and traffic. They had no choice to ride out the storm.
“I was starting to lose it then,” says Deborah.
David remembers looking out form the cracks in the plywood covering the doors and windows and seeing angry gulf waters swirl around and eventually into his home. As the water filled the home, Katrina’s wind blew apart neighboring buildings and her storm surges ripped apart home after home.
They still have a roof over their heads and food is coming in from donations and shelters. They have adopted a stray border collie they call Kat, short for Katrina.
Cheers,
Nathan W. Armes
Denver Photographer & Photojournalist
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Lives Torn Apart – Survivor’s Stories Part II of IV
Posted on 20. Aug, 2010 by Nathan W. Armes in blog: on assignment
Hurricane Katrina ripped homes from their foundations, trees from the ground and lives apart. Over the next few days I will recap three stories from Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, which felt the full force of the storm.
Thursday Aug. 19: 5 Year Anniversary of Katrina
Today, Friday Aug. 20: Chris Steiner – Waveland, Miss.
Saturday Aug 21: Deborah & David Burgess – Bay St. Louis, Miss.
Sunday Aug 22: . Rebecca McIntosh & Kathy Everard – Waveland, Miss.
VIA The Hickory Daily Record. September 11, 2005
Chris Steiner, 63, owes his life to a nameless fishing boat and quick thinking.
Steiner and a friend, Martha Keen, 79, rode out the storm in his family home in Waveland, Miss., because, as he says, “this was not supposed to happen.”
Steiner’s roots run deep along the Gulf Coast. For generations, his family has retreated to a home in the small beach community for shelter because of it’s sturdy construction and the fact that water has never risen so far inland. This time, the house would not be spared.
Around 4 a.m. Aug. 29, the power went out in Waveland. Steiner and Keen still has enough hot water to enjoy a cup of coffee.
Then all hell started breaking loose, says Steiner.
The fury Katrina unleashed on the Gulf Coast is historic. Steiner made all the right moves to survive.
“No, panic,” says Steiner.
“God gives us something like automatic pilot.
Everything was clear about what we had to do to save out butts.”
Then the water started to rise.
“Water was coming through the floor, and right there that was the alarm.
That just doesn’t happen.”
With the water rising and the chance of survival slipping away, Steiner had to a make a decision: fight or flight?
In many flood situations, victims move to the highest point in the home, usually the attic, to ride out the deluge. When the water keeps rising – and people become trapped – matters become deadly.
Steiner grabbed Keen and tied an extension cord around her waist. He gave her an ice chest to help her float as they exited the house.
“Martha, we’re going out, we’re not going to be a drowned rat,” Steiner recalls saying.
The wind howled and the salty floodwaters rose around them. Though the water never totally flooded the house, Steiner believed he was making the right decision.
“It’s blowing, it’s serious. There is no fear at this point,” says Steiner.
As Katrina’s eye passed over the sleepy beach community they swam to a boat, a Boston whaler, to ride out the remainder of the storm.
“The sky lightened and the winds started to die down,” he said.
The survivors spent the remainder of the storm, just over an hour, in the bulkhead, covered by a bench, sharing a Coca-Cola they stumbled upon in the boat’s cooler.
As floodwaters and storm surges receded, the boat came to a rest at an angle, still attached to a steel trailer which never moved.
It was Aug. 31, before Keen was evacuated by two National Guard members.
Steiner helped the two guardsmen put the tired and ragged Keen into a Humvee.
“I kissed her on the cheek and said, ‘You’re in the system. We’ll find you,” Steiner said.
Though Steiner is physically OK, he worries about his friend. As of Monday, there was still no word on Keen’s whereabouts.
Steiner placed a small piece of duct tape on the living room wall to serve as a watermark. It’s almost 8 feet high in a home that sits on 3-foot stilts.
Steiner’s home now teeters on its foundation. His great aunt willed him the house. “Whoever built this knew what they where doing,” he says as he runs a hand up the molding to the kitchen door.
The house groans.
Cheers,
Nathan W. Armes
Denver Photographer & Photojournalist
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Lives Torn Apart – 5 Year Anniversary of Katrina Part I of IV
Posted on 19. Aug, 2010 by Nathan W. Armes in blog: on assignment
At around 6 a.m. the morning of Aug. 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast leaving a scar that has still not completely healed. As a younger photojournalist working for a small paper in North Carolina five years ago, this was a story I really had no business venturing into.
I had no plan but felt compelled to drive as far south as possible to document the events that I had sat wide-eyed watching on my computer screen and television.
Planning to travel on my days off I packed my Jeep with food, gas containers and water then headed to Biloxi, Miss., where I would find myself sleeping on the floor of the photo department at the Sun Herald. The newspaper had survived the storm surge and was a base camp for journalists from all over the United States – and the world at this point.
The first morning in Biloxi the journalists that had been covering in and out of Biloxi suggested I head toward Waveland, Miss. Then they pointed to a large map.
“Anything south of these railroad tracks is gone,” one photographer said as he traced the outline of the tracks that followed the contours of the coast.
The huge storm surges caused the majority of the damage – that and the debris the huge waves carried through neighborhoods and streets. You could look up into the trees and see the effects the crashing debris and waves had by locating the scars almost 25-feet into the trees. Cars, dumpsters, and bits of broken homes crashed through the tall stands of pine early Aug. 29.
The photographer was correct, the railroad tracks was the point of no return and no storm surge – on record – had ever reached that far north.
Covering this catastrophic event has had lasting effects on me, not just mentally but in how I looked at my neighbors. Would my neighbors wade out into a historic storm surge to save me like Chris Steiner did for his 79-year-old neighbor, Martha Keen? The two where forced to ride out the hurricane in the bottom of a small boat anchored by a heavy steel trailer.
“This was not suppose to happen,” Steiner said as we sat near the nameless fishing boat that saved his life.
At around 4 a.m. August 29, the power went out in Waveland, Miss. Then all hell started to break loose.
** Over the next few days I will be reposting small vignettes (and photographs) written during my stay in Waveland, Bay St. Louis and Biloxi, Mississippi. The following is a column that I was asked to write after returning from the Gulf Coast.
Thursday Aug. 19: 5 Year Anniversary of Katrina
Today, Friday Aug. 20: Chris Steiner – Waveland, Miss.
Saturday Aug 21: Deborah & David Burgess – Bay St. Louis, Miss.
Sunday Aug 22: . Rebecca McIntosh & Kathy Everard – Waveland, Miss
VIA: The Hickory Daily Record. September 8, 2005.
At sunrise, calm surrounds me. The gulf waters are tranquil. The sky is full of inviting pinks and blues.
I close my eyes tight, and I could be on any beach at sunrise.
If I listened hard enough, a peaceful silence is broken only by tiny waves lapping at the sand by my feet.
I open my eyes and turn around.
The beach where I am standing is full of debris. A chair, a half-buried Coke machine and rusting twisted metal litter the sand. A fishing net hangs in a Spanish oak. A large pile of waterlogged hymnals sits by the street.
Many historic homes that once stood proud in Gulfport, Miss., are now slabs of concrete.
The destruction on the coast south of U.S. 90 is staggering, but coastal locations in and around Waveland, Miss., are obliterated. What were once neighborhoods are now piles of wood, washers and dyers, photo albums, broken plates and broken lives.
One week later, the thick layers of mud are beginning to dry, but the stench of decay remains. If not for an onshore breeze, the smell might be overwhelming.
Everywhere I turn I am reminded of the lives lost and those victims yet to be recovered, but when I meet people like Rebecca McIntosh, 17, of Waveland and Deborah and David Burgess of Bay St. Louis, Miss., I am reminded the spirit of a resilient people remains.
I am also reminded why people rush to donate cases of water and diapers through their church or volunteer with the Red Cross.
If people like Judy Miller, Catawba Country Red Cross Chapter volunteer, did not help the people of the Gulf Coast, then a woman in a shelter in Biloxi, Miss., would have never retrieved her cat Trixie, her only companion. Miller ventured into a storm-damaged apartment to save a stranger’s pet.
Another local Red Cross volunteer, Natasha Denny, just graduated from Catawba Valley Community College and planned on applying to Chapel Hill to study law. But after a few 12-hour shifts at a shelter in Mobile, Ala., she plans to focus on helping people. She says it’s a great experience and the three weeks of volunteer work will teach her many things about herself and life.
“I know I will come back and not take so much for granted,’ she says.
We all have so much in this country – plenty of food, plenty of water and plenty of hope and compassion. Citizens like Denny and Miller reach into themselves to find the will and energy to extend a hand to those with nothing. Even though the both would shun the attention, we should thank them and all the volunteers who find something in themselves that they are willing to give to a complete stranger.
The Gulf Coast will rebuild. You can see it in the face of Rebecca McIntosh when she smiles while talking about finding a porcelain doll, given to her by her grandmother, in the muddy ruins of her home.
Deborah and David Burgess celebrated their 11th wedding anniversary on Sept. 1 in their muddy Bay St. Louis home. They sleep on a waterlogged mattress.
They have no running water and electricity, but yet they offer me a canned soda they received from a neighborhood shelter. At first I declined, but Deborah insisted. So I drank one of my first cold drinks in two days, standing in the Burgess’ living room with warped floors, a soggy sofa and destroyed artwork.
I do not feel guilty, because it made her happy. It was the least I could do. It’s the least any of us can do.
****
The following is the original layout and you can click on the image to load a larger view. Look for part II on Friday.
Cheers,
Nathan W. Armes
Denver Photographer & Photojournalist
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Tundra Research – For The Denver Post
Posted on 16. Aug, 2010 by Nathan W. Armes in blog: on assignment
“Government- backed researchers are trying to spin the clock forward by erecting heat lamps and planting thousands of seedlings in Colorado’s high country to test whether climate change may cause the timberline to gradually march up the mountain.
No trees currently survive here, at 11,600 feet, where wind gusts can reach 90 miles per hour.
But early research results indicate that trees in a warmer Colorado would germinate seven weeks earlier than at present springtime tundra temperatures.”
Cheers,
Nathan W. Armes
Denver Photographer & Photojournalist
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Flattr – Social Micropayment Platform
Posted on 09. Aug, 2010 by Nathan W. Armes in blog: on assignment
VIA: tomasvh
This is an interesting idea for those looking to utilize social media and the ‘crowd’ to help fund projects.
Flattr was founded to help people share money, not only content. Before Flattr, the only reasonable way to donate has been to use Paypal or other systems to send money to people. The threshold for this is quite high. People would just ignore sending donations if it wasn’t for a really important cause. Sending just a small sum has always been a pain in the ass. Who would ever even login to a payment system just to donate €0.01? And €10 was just too high for just one blog entry we liked..
Flattr solves this issue. When you’re registered to flattr, you pay a small monthly fee. You set the amount yourself. In the end of the month, that fee is divided between all the things you flattered. You’re always logged in to the account. That means that giving someone some flattr-love is just a button away. And you should! Clicking one more button doesn’t add to your fee. It just divides the fee between more people! Flattr tries to encourage people to share. Not only pieces of content, but also some money to support the people who created them. With love!
Cheers,
Nathan W. Armes
Denver Photographer & Photojournalist
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