A pleasant way to end the year. A smiling child in color and BW. Happy New Year!

I did an editorial shoot several months ago for a magazine detailing the story about a home builder that used some unusual sales and financing plans. The program seemed to be a perfect technique for first time, low income buyers to get their first homes.

The plan fell apart when the company’s promises of FHA loan guarantees weren’t met and homeowners discovered their property was worth less than what they’d financed.

The day of the shoot was ordinary except it was a rush job, the magazine needing the images quickly for layout. Barely had time to wait for the sun to move across the sky for the right angle. If only they could have waited until today. The light was great, the lake smooth and the sky clear.

It was a busy day at the Old Skool skateboard shop, especially if you were a kid with gift cards.

I spent about an hour watching the steady stream of boys bring in boards for repair and upgrades, and replace old boards with new unscarred ones. Some came with a parent or grandparent who paid the bill. A few others came by themselves or in groups of kids about their age.

A comfortable couch and chairs sit at the front of the storefront on a side street in downtown. A perfect place to watch the small black and white television in the corner while just hanging around the popular shop. The city recently opened a skateboard park and BMX track on bottom land near the creek a short skateboard ride away to provide a safe place other than city hall, a bank and the school parking lot for boarders.

Racks on the wall were barely half full three days past Christmas even after a delivery of fresh skateboards the day before. Most had disappeared in a rush of gift cards and cash collected from under the tree.

This boarder, wearing the proper name brand accouterments, stands with his new Rob Welsh skateboard, paid for with only $6.98 cash and $150 gift cards.

Much debate begins today about the legacy of President Ford who died Tuesday at 93. For those of us who lived through the Vietnam War era, Watergate, attempted assassinations, and the BeeGees may argue over Ford’s pardon of Nixon or how he was portrayed at the end of the war. Even today it took no more than a couple of posts on the sportsshooter forum about his death to begin political debate about the decision.

Lost in this argumentative environment is Ford’s relationship with David Hume Kennerly who became the president’s personal photographer. Kennerly had already won his Pulitzer Prize for Vietnam war coverage in 1972 when he began to work for Time magazine covering the White House where he met Ford. Kennerly’s tenure as Chief White House Photographer is described in Shooter, his autobiography written at 30.

Kennerly’s photos helped define Ford’s presidency. Never elected to the office, Ford’s image of a studious, serious man worried about his impact on history was illustrated through Kennerly’s fly on the wall images. This type of intimate access and coverage ended with the Ford presidency. No president since has allowed a photographer to roam through the halls of the White House and residence with such abandon. We are at a loss because of it.

There’s more to read about Kennerly at Rangefinder and PhotoWorkshop.

Eds Note: Is this the best photo The New York Times can find to use on the front of their Web site to illustrate the story of Ford’s death?

I’m not a great fan of indoor water parks, especially in the winter. I grew up in north Florida where swimming in spring-fed lakes and ponds was a almost daily affair. It’s not a fear of water or over-chlorinated water that’s turned me against indoor water parks. It was Cleveland Stadium and a playoff game against the Denver Broncos.

The Browns were attempting again, to advance to the Super Bowl with a post-season game with Denver. If you’re a Browns fan you know the story. If not, it’s a sad tale.

A photographer was assigned to cover the end of game celebration-dejection in the Browns locker room where we stashed a camera and flash before start of the game. The cold weather would have caused a camera being brought into the locker room from outside to fog up  as soon as it hit the warm, humid air. A camera in the room for at least three hours was acclimated to the indoor conditions. The assigned photographer left his cameras with another photographer and shot what was dejection with a clear lens and viewfinder.

Every time I end up at an indoor water park with a camera it fogs up with similar circumstances to the Browns game.

Don’t misunderstand, it wasn’t the Browns loss that injured me enough to hate water parks. It was the beer.

About half way through the third quarter I left the darkroom to relieve my full bladder. I rushed into the mens room to make a quick stop while film dried. I stopped short just inside the door to a surreal sight. The urinals in the stadium were porcelain troughs anchored to the walls. A pipe across the top flushed the urine.

The trough across the room from the doorway hung at an angle, its corner anchor pulled loose from the wall. The water missed the urinal and flowed across the inclined floor to a central drain. The unoccupied urinal was filled with yellow liquid also slowly draining onto the floor. Standing in the flow of liquid stood a vendor selling beer. Beer whose color matched the liquid sitting in the damaged trough. Fans bled their bladders, washed their hands, paid for a refill and moved out of the room for the stands, seemingly oblivious to the strange scene.

I’ve never been able to get past a fogged camera without thinking of my afternoon visit to a Cleveland Stadium bathroom.

Today’s photo is from a visit to a water park with the family. My camera fogged up and I used the bathroom once.

Two seemingly unrelated events happened to me about ten days ago.

I was searching through the files in my basement where I keep the dregs of experience in old chests of drawers. Among these unusable leftovers is a surviving Nikon F camera from my youth and a collection of manual camera lenses and filters. The multi-colored 52mm diameter filters still in their original screw-top containers are in a fold-out Domke canvas holder in the top drawer as if they needed to be more easily found than the household connector flash cables in the bottom drawer.

I’d hoped the holder’s compartments would be large enough for the graded ND Cokin filters I now use. The openings were too small. They’ll continue to sit side by side in a separate gadget bag.

Later that day I downloaded Photoshop CS3 Beta, the latest iteration from Adobe. I’ve used PS since version 2.5 when it was the software provided with a high-end Microtek flatbed scanner.

There are a number of improvements, among them a change in the way the menus can be expanded along the right side of the screen. The Camera RAW interface has changed with a few additions such as being able to open jpg in the RAW input dialog.

There isn’t an instruction manual and help is missing so I’ve had to look for some of the changes myself and with the help of some online Photoshop enthusiasts.

For those of us who keep a collection of red, green, blue and orange filters in our desk drawers, the addition of a Black & White adjustment layer is long overdue. Converting digital RGB images to grayscale has been an iffy proposition often more guess work with channels, luminance and adjustment layers than traditional technique.

Today’s photo is an example of a scene I knew would look much better as a black and white image. In my hand was a high-end digital camera capable of recording 12-bit images at moderate grain on a cloudy, wet Christmas afternoon. Not a good day for color other than flat contrast, monotone images with little detail. I imagined pulling out a red filter to add contrast, underexposing 1/2 a stop to add contrast and printing on number four contrast paper for a crisp final print. That is now a lost art for most photographers. Gone out the door with the trash.

Photoshop has helped bring it back with this new B&W adjustment layer. It’s far from perfect and an computer monitor is not the best method for judging B&W tonal ranges. But it’s a start.

The layer dialog allows adjustment of individual colors similar to the hue and saturation adjustment layer. It also provides a series of presets for more familiar filters such as red and high contrast red. There’s even a tint dialog that simplifies making toned images.

What I don’t like about the new layer is it’s too simple. Now everyone can do it without study. Now I don’t have to worry about that set of old filters in the top drawer.

It was a fine Christmas day although the clouds didn’t bring snow. There was plenty of kids, too much smoked ham and discarded wrapping paper, and a brief afternoon nap after everyone cleared the house.  Only then could I travel to Hoover Dam for a quick frame.

The 4:00 p.m. Christmas vigil mass fills our church’s regular sanctuary, the secondary room at the school and the rented 3,000 seat gymnasium at the nearest high school. I’m not sure where all these people are during the normal mass schedule. It’s impossible there would be standing room only an hour before a Sunday mass unless the Pope himself delivered the homily. The total of the 6:00 p.m. mass and the three on Christmas Day surely are more than attend a months worth of normal masses.

It’s also one of the few times entire families attend church together. At least four generations of blond hair women and thin-haired men filled one row. Grandparents gathered the youngest generation on their laps to read children’s books with the Bible story of the nativity to help pass the time or fed then Cheerios, the sacramental bread for children.

One young girl near where I stood next to the confessional spent the 45 minutes before mass began playing video games on her i-Pod or sharing a game with her sister on their father’s PDA phone.