Sarah Ause Kichas | saussie.com »

Now back to our regular Friday schedule.

Been a while, crocodile. Computer is back up and running though so we’ll now return to our regularly scheduled program.

Not my best week (photographically), but whatev. You win some, you lose some. Still had a fantastic week (non-photographically). Yee-haw.

I’m leaving out the cheap kid shots this week.

Small week this week. Took a fair share of photos, but not ones I really feel like posting on here. I think I’m getting lazy at blogging. This laziness will likely only be short-lived. Guess it was just more a week in the mind rather than a week in photos. My mind is outside of photography right now. This is a whole other blog post.

Originally I had about 800 photos to post here this week (very, very busy week), but I decided to be super-duper selective instead. So if you want to see the other ones, you’re gonna have to head on over to me Flickr page.

Yesterday, a letter was sent to the editor accusing our photographer Scott of staging photos. This is completely false. Not only do I know that he would not do such a thing, but I was right there with him when this so-called staging took place. When we shot the “junior golf crap” together last week, I was the golf cart driver, and Scott took photos as I zoomed around. Once stopped, I took a few as well. As we approached our first batch of golf students, we stopped about 80 feet away while Scott took a cute photo of two young boys sitting atop their parked golf cart. This is the primary reason for the letter. Because the golf course would never allow children to ride atop golf carts, them sitting up there must certainly have been the result of Scott telling them to do so. Not surprisingly, it was the director of the golf course who sent this letter. But maybe Mr. Director should talk to his coaches before making such accusations. Thing is, not only were those kids sitting on top of the parked golf cart, but they stayed on it when the cart was being driven. Also indicted in the letter was a photo of mine (though my name was never mentioned in this brutal email) of two boys behind the wheel of a golf cart. Obviously, the golf course would never allow young kids to drive, so that photo must have been staged as well. But here’s the thing, I didn’t take a picture of kids driving a golf cart. I took a picture of kids making noises like “vroom, vroom” as they jerk around the steering wheel. They are kids. They do this. Their legs do not reach the pedals. But get this, those kids did accidentally hit the brake off and ran over their teacher’s foot.

However, this is only background information. The bigger issue at hand is something else. Scott found out about this letter when a printed copy was left on his desk with a note that said “SCOTT, NOT GOOD” on it from the editor. Scott went and explained the situation. He did nothing wrong, and didn’t worry too much about it. When he showed me the email, I laughed at how ridiculous this guy was and made a point to mention to our editor that I was right there with Scott and that the email is indeed a load of crap. I got busy with shoots yesterday and forgot. Then again this morning, I meant to, but again forgot. We never thought the letter would actually run, so it didn’t seem a life-or-death situation. I finally remembered and said one simple little sentence to my editor: “Just so you know, that email is a load of horseshit.” And she runs, not walks, back to her office, yelling at someone to pull the letter, and gets on the phone to call Mr. Director and “give him hell.” But had I not said that one little sentence, it seems that letter would have run. And poor Scott would have had his name demolished by his own paper for something he never did. He explained everything, and it is unfair that his voice was ignored, yet one little sentence by me changes everything. I don’t know why my voice is taken as the truth, yet his is not. Sadly, I know he has always felt like I am the favorite child… and when stuff like this happens, I can’t blame him.

Lack of posting lately has been due to busy work and personal life, but also because my internet time has been devoted strictly to archiving my photos online. I was using a place called Fotki, but only for the fact that you can code it to look like your own website. This requires too much CSS for my taste and is a pain in the arse to change. I got sick of it and decided to see what all the Flickr hoopla was about. I may not be able to blend it with my site, but I do understand why people love it so. My life feels so much more organized now!

I’m not sure why, but I have always resized my photos for the internet in Photoshop and saved them as separate files. For this reason, all my photos on the internet are useless to me later should I lose original files. And not to mention, my hard drive is chocked full of these useless 600-pixel pictures. So this past week I have been trying to dig up old files, the original ones, and it has been a bit of a chore. I’ve dug through piles of CDs and even busted out my old desktop PC (which lived in my car for the better part of a year and didn’t work the last time I tried to turn it on). I’m glad it worked this time though because so many important files lie within that piece of crap. I’ve uploaded only full-size photos to Flickr and feel much safer because of it. Personal or work, it is all on there in its full-size glory… so hopefully when this Powerbook goes (which I’m sure won’t be too far away), all will not be lost. Plus, full-size images scaled down appear sharper (though sometimes too sharp), and Flickr seems to hold my blacks better than Fotki and even my own webserver.

So without further ado, let me introduce you to my Flickr page.

And now that that’s out of the way, on with the show!

I may have only worked yesterday and Wednesday this past week, but between those two days and my long weekend in Jackson, a plentiful week in photos abounds. And we’re off!

As per usual, photos I don’t completely hate from the past week.