Double Dutch, finally the ball rolls on getting the implosion pictures going, made the first trip to Jonesboro, Arkansas to catch the Arkansas State University TWIN TOWERS dorm buildings be imploded. Gnarly late night solo flight/drive with some good parking lot sleep PLUS the shattering of my ground glass in the 4×5 thanks to American Airlines lovely new baggage policy where they charge you for all checked bags, PLUS guarantee to break some of your stuff too. Sleep deprivation breeds etheral experience, and I was floatin on a hot, juicy, Southern Cloud for 36 hours of mayhem.
Super Rodney Staton Piercey, got one of the wildest degrees that I have known to exist. I hope he runs my Flight Simulator to Hell Piece before they totally kick his access out of that Aeronautical University by the Sea. But seriously so happy for Staton and D Wright and all the other tossers who have made it their life’s mission to graduate from school this year.
Not to mention the system that Bob Knigh Photography uses to ensure zero possible piracy of their academic event photography (unless you enjoy pixelation), a quick exerpt from HIS site:
Bob Knight began taking pictures in 1975, while he was a sophomore at Florida State University. His initial clients were mostly sororities and fraternities, and he soon expanded into other college campuses and high school markets.
Bob built his reputation one picture at a time, always striving to produce the best photograph at an affordable price. He recognized that a good photographer sells photographs, but a great photographer captures memories.
Now, three decades later, Bob Knight Photo is one of the leading commencement and special event photography companies. We take over 450,000 photographs each year in the state university and secondary school systems across the nation.
In 1995, our corporate headquarters moved into expanded offices that feature a dedicated customer service center, a research and development department and a photography equipment and training center. Coupled with our Los Angeles office that services both Northern and Southern California, Bob Knight Photo sets the standard for commencement and special event photography.
In 2003, Bob Knight Photo became the exclusive provider of GradTrak™, our unique image management system specifically designed for large commencement ceremonies. It is a sequence of over 100 integral steps of a digital workflow process, taking and tracking images through all stages. Having Bob Knight Photo and GradTrak™ at your ceremony provides you with the fastest, most accurate, and most convenient service in the world.
I wonder if the NSA has access to the database of recent relatively idealistic college graduates, and to what ends could this highly organized photographic database of mostly undocumented non-offenders could be used?
It certainly seems in the proper engineer’s hands you could extract a huge amount of visual social network information, supporting the text based demographic and network analysis that definitely goes on daily.
A visit home to Daytona this last weekend held the usual bag of castoff hidden gems; the mutations of the American Dream developed (without zoning enforcement). While in Justin Rancourt’s Coke Pit, I saw a photo album comprised of 4×6 inch drug store color glossy prints documenting the history of a client’s business: Aerial Advertising. Growing up surfing on the Atlantic coast, pretty much daily, even in the waning light of Daytona’s grungy tourist appeal, a small prop plane would buzz overhead, carting its blocky offers of all-you-can-eat pork, half priced bikinis, or in the case of this photo album, marriage proposals.
Of course I totally forgot to scan all of the pictures I wanted out of this album, but Justin was nice enough to send me a few. Often photographically decoupled from the airplane, ghostly, floating sentences hanging in the air, at once charged with the uppercase and aerial aggression of a god, but simultaneously here-and-then gone. Living in our civilization’s much harangued era of wireless communication, it is beautiful to see visualized these otherwise invisible transmissions in such a bulky, often loud way.
Perhaps in a few years, these dubiously certified prop plane pilots will be motoring around, broadcasting the same sort of messages to a radius of localized cell phone users, dropping their invisible payload at unsuspecting citizens.
Billboard giant Van Wagner certainly gives a compelling case for the technological underpinnings of their air media campaigns:
“Our custom designed rudder and tunneling systems aerodynamically position displays at the most opportune angles. They enable us to maximize visibility and showcase displays so they appear virtually wrinkle free. To ensure programs run as planned, we’ve equipped our entire fleet with state-of-the-art GPS devices to monitor campaigns. This enables us to provide precise, timely proof-of-performance reporting that can be tracked from desktop computers in real time.”
I wonder what the ideal flight corridor for dragging a 300 foot long sign that advertises “PUT YOUR FEET BACK ON THE STREET WWW.ALESTESBAILBONDS.COM”, and how that map visualization might look.
Maybe a 21st century poet will take up the charge, abandon his or her notebook for the skies, raining down up the masses one line charges hitting at the very core of human nature.
