Anna Nicole and the November iPhone photo project

I did the math. If I do all I need to do between now and the time I have a break on December 9th, I should have about 10 minutes a day for Rapid Eye Reality. The last time I ran into this situation, I let my little home here wither on the vine. In an effort to not let this happen, I needed something to keep this space alive.

I noticed yesterday that I have about 120 photos on my iPhone that I have taken over the past ten months. Most of those photos end up getting posted to my Twitter feed or Facebook. They rarely appear here because the picturess generally suck. Still, they are sort of a visual record of my 2009.

So, for the next month or so, I’m going to post one of the photos and the briefest of stories about it. Hey, at least it’s something, ya know?

***

Anna Nicole Smith’s final rest
January 2009

It’s a long and winding road around the Caribbean Sea that leads from Paradise Island, through the heart of Nassau, and on to the airport that would eventually take me off the island for another year. Once again, after more than a week in the heart of the islands’ biggest poker event, I found myself weary and in the back of a cab.

The cab slowed just enough as we passed the salmon-colored gates the guard the little cemetery on the ocean’s edge. There, somewhere in the ground laid the body of Anna Nicole Smith. She was a woman who sought fame and found it. She was a woman who wanted money and found it, too. Now she was as dead as everybody else in the sandy ground alongside the highway. For all her life of reality excess, she was now part of what could only be described as a rolling sight-seeing trip in a place far more beautiful that her legacy could ever boast.

We didn’t stop.

anna-nicole-smith-grave

Brad Willis

Brad Willis is a writer based in Greenville, South Carolina. Willis spent a decade as an award-winning broadcast journalist. He has worked as a freelance writer, columnist, and professional blogger since 2005. He has also served as a commentator and guest on a wide variety of television, radio, and internet shows.

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5 Responses

  1. Mean Gene says:

    What photo apps are you using, because there are some that allow you to really improve your iPhone shots. I use, let’s see…CameraGenius (anti-shake and you can shoot by touching any part of the screen, along with a timer and a zoom). PhotoShop Mobile let’s you adjust exposure, saturation, you can crop/rotate/etc. Photogene does many of the same things (better, even, and I’m not an official sponsor or anything). Best Camera lets you apply different filters in combination, fun to play with. As is CameraBag, which applies preset “looks” to your pics.

    The two I’ve been digging a lot is Tilt-Shift Generator and ColorSplash. Tilt-Shift allows you to apply selective focus to the shot, so you can take a picture of someone and then change the focus point so you blur and skew the perspective of the shot. Neato. ColorSplash lets you selectively color certain parts of the pic, all you do is paint with your finger on the screen and it’s surprisingly easy.

    In total it’s like ten bucks for all those apps and they can dramatically improve your iPhone pics. I’m like addicted to photo apps.

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