I got an email from my friend Brian T Murphy yesterday with a surprise POPTPOP bomb. What better way to spend time at a wedding than to shoot a poptpop that is itself an ENDLESS WORMHOLE OF PICTURES OF PICTURES OF PICTURES OF PICTURES.

Photo by T Scott Carlisle of Brian T Murphy shooting a photo of himself AND Scott.

My grandmother finally found a new place to live.

It's Thanksgiving here in America and that means family gatherings of all kinds. This photo sort of sums up mine this year. This is my aunt Joan has had an iPad for about a month and loves to take accidental videos photos with it. For example...

ps, least convenient camera original.

We went for hike a while back. Steph's dad drew a little rock-doodle self portrait on the stone. If you look closely you can see a tiny bearded face.

I made it a point during my last trip to New York to go bug the good people at mental_floss magazine. Conveniently located near about a million bead stores, where I'd clearly be shopping anyway, the office (which they share with The Week) was guarded by a delightful lady whom I managed to con into buzzing me in. Sucker.

I was greeted warmly by Mangesh and crew, above, though my presence clearly upset the force in the area, as a fight immediately broke out down on the street within minutes of my arrival.

So I left.

I came back the next day with a SWAT team, though thankfully it was not needed.

We all walked around for a while and quizzed strangers with trivia questions, occasionally cornering obvious tourists and peppering them with Amazing Facts, and we were eventually all arrested for doing science experiments on passers-by.

Winslow watches everybody's back and totes a Journal filled with mind blowing information.

Josh, also up from the Birmingham office

Jason (managing editor of mentalfloss.com) seems pleased to not be on the internet for a moment.

Ethan has fallen asleep on the elevator. This is not a lie.

Mangesh eventually cracked the whip and forced everyone to start working again. His smile is deceiving; He's a brutal taskmaster at heart. Winslow tries desperately to explain his design.

As punishment for public sleeping, Ethan was put on bean counting duty.

Eventually, m_f President Will Pearson came back from his Diet Mt Dew run. He promptly asked me to leave.

Holy crap! I'm so excited! I got a comment on a photo on flickr yesterday from user cool-baby about a camera he made. A couple of weeks ago he told me about a 4x5 Lego camera he made in reaction to the one I made, which made me pretty happy, but yesterday's shout out took me to a new level.

The above photo is a shot of his 8x10 Lego camera! I hate that he beat me to the punch on making an 8x10, but I don't have enough bricks around to make it happen, so I can't feel too bad. I'm dying to see something he shoots with it!

Check out his flickr stream to watch the progress!

Below is a detail shot of the camera, a note for which mentioned the lens is from a Seneca Uno he got on eBay.

More walking about from New York last week.

Another, slightly underrated (compared to Times Square, anyway) tourist photo spot in New York.

THAT BUS DID NOT HURT ANYWAY. KEANU REEVES WAS NOT DRIVING. Just so you know.

This trip to New York, in one sense, was a total disaster. On the other hand, I got to see my sister, hang out with the mental_floss crew, meet with a recent client I shot for, as well as meet with the Times.

While I was walking over to mental_floss I noticed the amazing light bouncing around Bryant Park (subliminal shout out to Tim Gunn!) so I wandered a while. Here are a few photos from that.

Adorable girl alert!

Walking around New York yesterday I stole blurry peoples' souls. Or something like that.

I'm hanging out at LGA watching fog wrap up everything in the New York area. I should have seen it coming, based on this photo from last night. Alas.

Rob at his desk

This is Remy. Dudes like him make me excited about technology advancements that are on the horizon. He's already writing apps for mobile devices and he's still in high school. I know that fact is probably "no big deal" but it reminds me of my high school computer exploits, which were decidedly lame in comparison (not to mention 1% as complex as what is readily available now). I taught myself how to hack old Mac apps (ResEdit! Who's with me!) and how to write horrible HTML when I was maybe in my second year of high school and I thought I was pretty damn awesome then. Now, if you've got an computer, email address, and a ability to ignore accept a(n) EULA, you can have developer level access to cutting edge coding tools. Amazing! Speaking of tools, I'll shut up.

I shot Remy a while back as an addition to the Super Student story that ran in Birmingham Magazine in August.

We're doing our damnedest to prep the hive for our first winter and several times a week I have stress dreams about our bees. They are weak, we think, but we're doing everything we can to help them out. I say we think because this is our first time to see them prep for cold weather, and, for all we know, everything is happening how it's supposed to. What do know for sure, though, is that we have varroa mites and a couple of other issues we're combating.

My point is this: I'm off topic and should talk about the photo. I've had a lifetime of incidental knowledge of beekeeping and have never go after getting my own experiential knowledge until this year. Sadly, the bulk of this time has been without my late grandfather. His giving spirit lives on through a guy he mentored, Scott. And Steph and Jill and I have benefitted from him generously giving his time and knowledge to us as we pester him about probably really basic questions.

As a tiny way of trying to say thanks, I went up to help them do their late summer extraction and grabbed a couple of shots while I was there. I'd planned on shooting way more, but there was far too much work to be done.

This is Scott in the front and his bee business partner Lowell in the background. This is after we'd finished the work we could actually do that day.

Beekeeping is pretty awesome, despite the occasional sting.

I was reading Post Secret this morning and saw this:

Totally strange! I have no idea where this secret originated, but I was excited to see it impacting someone (presumably) positively. Although, not at all in the originally intended way.

The Pink Hanger campaign is an initiative by M&B Hangers (the last remaining metal hanger company to be producing hangers in the US) to raise cancer awareness. I was surprised to see the hanger because I photographed their factories and the pink hanger ad campaign for them. I never really think about where hangers come from, but seeing them in the wild is nice since I know the people themselves who do the work to make the hangers possible.

I blogged a bit about the experience last year, if you'd like to read a bit more about it and see some of the kind faces of the M+B employees.

I shot some portraits the last couple of days on the Legotron and the field camera, testing out some Kodak Portra 160. This'll be the first COLOR film I've shot through the Legotron...Super excited about that.

The above shot is by Bryan while I prepped to shoot him and Branden at their studio (aka down the hall).

Here's what it looked like (sort of) to shoot Branden.

I also shot Chris Bennett of Hollow Spring Farm the other day. You'll see Chris in the November issue of Birmingham Magazine in an awesome story about foraging. Caleb was around and grabbed this shot of me looking ridiculous.

Our journey as beekeepers keeps us on our toes. This week we treated our bees with powdered sugar to hopefully defeat the bastard Varroa mites that we've got currently. I took some video today of the bees going crazy and cleaning each other off. Short video but it reminds me how happy the girls make me.

Bonus: Steph's family was in town and came to the bee yard with us. Her dad makes a cameo.

I continue to shoot more food and I am enjoying it with increasing intensity. I shot a local restaurant yesterday and I can't wait to show those images. November is a big food month for me, it seems.

Sometimes you shoot all morning (yesterday, for example) and sometimes it's in and out in under an hour. Last month I dropped by local restaurant ORE to shoot some of their food and get a feel for their ambience. The above photo may be a simple shot, but it was fun to make.

Once November rolls around, look for more foodstuffs here on the blog. VERY excited for those.

I made a quick video of random footage I've taken at our beehive. We blog about our bees over at We Three Beeks, in case you'd like to see more about this stuff.

(The video is prettier in HD)

video brief:

As we've tended our first hive for our first year, I've snapped a bunch of pictures and a few videos. Last week, in an attempt to fend off invading yellow jacket bastards, we put in an entrance reducer. I took a video of the chaos that followed, with the bees having to find the tiny hole that is now the main way to get in and out, and decided I wanted to post that today. That lead to looking for other clips and that lead to making a short reel of our delightful little ladies.

A recent story I was working on was shot, in part, at the home of Duquette and Morgan Johnston. And Duke, being the dashing man that he is, was an immediate target for an outtake shot.