My final posting from VT...
It's the little things from here I'll miss. For example, during my final photo shoot in a lab that studies infectious diseases. I was packing my gear up after the shoot, and I set my pocket wizard down on the counter for a second. One of the grad students walked by while I was picking it back up of the counter and said, "Oh, uh, you might want to wash your hands."

Anywho, I'll be in transit for the next several weeks, so my next post won't be until mid-September.
OU or bust...

Cruel Summer...

So my shoot yesterday was a test of my dedication to the craft. I had a morning shoot at VTTI, Virginia Tech Transportation Institute; it's the premier institute for all transportation technology. Anyways, they have this thing called the "Smart Road" here; it's a road that leads to a bridge some 30 stories above the valley floor. The big deal about this "Smart Road" is that they can produce any and all types of weather at any time. They have snow machines that produce, fog, rain, sleet, or snow all along the road. Then they sit up in an air-traffic control tower type thing and launch semi-trucks down the road.
Any who, so yesterday was the record high in Blacksburg, it was 94-degress, 76% humidity, which made for a heat index of 104-degrees. So we're out on this bridge in this heat, I set my camera down on the ladder I'm shooting from to adjust some lights. I pick the camera back up and go to focus when the rubber focus ring just melts into the lens. I try to zoom out but the same thing happens with the rubber zoom ring, it melts into the lens. I swap out the lens and keep shooting. We spent three hours on the bridge shooting. Needless to say, the images are crap cuz my brain was on fire.

So that's a first for me, having a lens melt in the middle of a shoot.

Another magazine cover...

Blacksburg's annual Steppin' Out Street Festival.

Dean of the Graduate School, Karen DePauw.