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From The City of Fountains to the City of Lights…

Yesterday I guest blogged “Top Ten things about Kansas City” over on Oh Joy and tonight I’m heading off to Paris (*EEeeeeEeeEE*) to shoot the Breast Cancer Awareness cinemagraph you all voted for! Thank you so much for the voting support, I can’t wait to show you what we capture!

pssst- follow the french adventure along with me on instagram! FromMeToYouJamie

24 Hours in Kansas City

A local brew, a renowned paper, a place that has kept growing with the times… Kansas City might be in the middle of our country but the pride in it’s history, culture, arts, businesses, districts and morals is among the top. It’s simply… nice.

24 Hours in is a series where I capture an honest portrayal of a place through my experience and what I see within 24 hours shared in 24 frames. All images taken with my Hasselblad 500c and black & white Ilford HP5 film.

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In the Footsteps of an American Outlaw:

“Rooms seemed hotter when he was in them. Rains fell straighter. Clocks slowed. Sounds were amplified. He considered himself a Southern loyalist and guerrilla in a Civil War that never ended. He regretted neither his robberies, nor the seventeen murders that he laid claim to. He had seen another summer under in Kansas City, Missouri and on September 5th in the year 1881, he was thirty-four-years-old.”

This is the farm where Jesse James grew up.

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Autumn Leaves

“The falling leaves drift by the window, the autumn leaves of red and gold….
I see your lips, the summer kisses, the sunburned hands, I used to hold.
Since you went away, the days grow long, and soon I’ll hear ol’ winter’s song.
But I miss you most of all my darling, when autumn leaves start to fall.”

— Johnny Mercer,  Autumn Leaves

Watkins Mill, Lawson, Missouri

Hammerpress, a Kansas City Letterpress

It’s letterpress at it’s very best~

While visiting First Friday Gallery Night in the Kansas City’s Crossroads Art District I came upon Hammerpress and was tickled to see a company that is using a bygone printing technique to make the most beautiful stationery, posters, artwork, business cards and design work. Everything you look at feels special in the same way a homemade pie is to store bought. The designs are personal, intricate, retro inspired, and completely unique. It’s the kind of card you hold on to and for me I enjoy to think about what the lead type letters wrote out decades before.

Apple Orchard

Feeling, smelling, and tasting the Fall…

I’ve always wanted to visit an apple orchard and this fall I finally got the chance to wander among the grounds of Alldredge Orchards. There was something wonderfully organic about the experience of picking an apple and then taking a big crispy bite out of it. I have to say, this braeburn apple was the best variety I’ve ever eaten, a beautiful combination of sweet and tart. I’m hooked…

The Apple Orchard

~by Lisa Bells

When sky rises high
and turns ever blue
Melodies in the orchard briskly fly
Who turned me into a musician
that can play the notes of apples

Muses would be amused by the picking rythem
and gods will enjoy in this season for their poems
with such a good reason –
Muses will admire me
for I have the orchard and the apple feasts

Who can organize such a band
of top players in my apple orchard?
Who will be a good listener of the music?
Autumn askes the grasshopers in the orchard
and the autumn insects hiding in it

Picking apples makes me into a dancer
accompanied by the musician of nature
The apple trees turn into a singer
Appolo driving his chariot over the orchard
shoot the performance into my head for ever

Alldredge Orchard, Platte City, Missouri

A Trip to the Farm

So I live in New York City which means I basically think the trees in Central Park are ‘wildlife’ . I think the last non-pet animal I saw was a raccoon hanging out on a fire escape on 2nd ave, and no, it wasn’t a hipster in disguise. When I called Animal Control I got the usual New Yorker response, “what do you want us to do about it?” and click. So when I get to go places with REAL wildlife I feel the excitement of discovery like when I was a little girl growing up in Texas collecting worms in my grandma’s back yard.

The animals are apart of Alldredge Orchards in Platte City, Missouri and while running around in my overalls and red lip gloss chasing chickens, picking apples and wondering into barns I’m sure I wasn’t allowed in I felt just like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. I can see how these characters could come to life in the imagination if left alone there (here’s where I push away from my work desk and break out into “somewhere over the rainbow”). I wonder how this would compare to the Tyson farm… which reminds me I need to see Food Inc. Anyway, please do meet my new farm friends: