AQUAPONICS! My garden MIGHT be cooler than your garden...

The aquaponics system!  

Saturday I finally set up my aquaponics system!  What's aquaponics?  Great question...

Get Out Of Debt

Currency from Mexico, Kenya and Latvia.  

I was recently asked to share a written testimony of how we got out of debt from a friend that will be leading a Dave Ramsey course at his church in Louisville Kentucky... 

04.25.10 - Okinda kids portraits and stories

This is Brighton Majwango. He's 7 and in the 1st grade. He likes singing and skipping and he dreams to be a pilot someday. It was probably Brighton's first time ever seeing a plane when we flew in.


This is Sharon Awuor. She is 11 and in the 7th grade. She likes to travel and play with friends. She wants to be an attorney when she grows up.


This is Wilfrida Moraa. She's 8 and in the second grade. She likes watching and wants to be a doctor.


This is Arnold Onyango. He's 8 years old and is in the first grade. He likes matching items and also wants to be a pilot.

Do me a favor. Take a minute to pray for these kids as you look at these pictures. Pray for them by name. Pray and ask God if you are suppose to help them in any way.

I struggled putting these pictures up here for everyone to see. I don't want it just to be some "nice picture" that we look at for 5 seconds and then disregard. These are real lives, with real dreams.

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From a photography standpoint... I saw this wall and wanted it as the background for the portraits. I went there early afternoon and the sun light was diffused shining in from a window to my right. I had the students step out about a foot or so from the wall.

There wasn't a TON of light, so I cranked my ISO up to 1600 to get a decent shutter speed hand held. I zoomed my 24-105 lens in around about 100mm and fired off 3 horizontal and 3 vertical pics. I focused in on their eyes. I choose f/4 to keep my shutter speed up and a shallow DOF to blur the background. Still a lot of these were pretty low for hand holding... 1/80th of a second or so. Relying pretty heavily on my IS.

The students were brought down in their classes by grade. Jess was handed a stack of sheets by the teachers with the students information on it. Name, age, grade, hobbies and dreams.

Jess called the students names and they came over to me to have their picture taken. After I took the pictures I told Jess what number the pictures were on the cf card and she wrote it down next to the students name. Jess was such a huge help, organizing the kids, letting the kids know who was on deck so the whole process went quickly.

Most of the students were very shy. When I asked them to smile they got embarrassed, sometimes their fellow classmates would playfully harass them which allowed me to get some pretty authentic expressions.

I had to continually ask the group of students to back up away from me. They were trying to see the display on the back of my camera and they would push in and start pushing me.

No fancy lighting set up... just good soft natural light. I tried to be fast, spending less than 30 seconds with each kid. Not my usual portrait technique but its a whole different ball game when you know you have to do 300 of these.

I wanted to shoot well enough and get good enough exposures that I didn't have to come back and edit all of these pictures. Sorting through and picking the best picture out of 6 (x 300) was enough for me. If any post production was done I might have bumped the exposures up just a tad in Lightroom in the quick develop module.

Questions? Comments?

I hope this blog post blessed you and brought a smile to your face. I can't help but look through these portraits and smile. :)

JIM baker

04.20.10 - the main reason I went to Africa...

This is Larisa Adoyo Ongeri. She is 14 and in the 8th grade. Larisa likes playing football, signing and reading storybooks One day she hopes to be a lawyer.

Larisa was the first of almost 300 portraits that I took while I was in Kenya.

If you're interested in sponsoring a student for $35 a month please contact Anne VanHouten.

Taken with the Canon 5d Mark II
24-105 f4 L IS USM
ISO 1600 - 67mm - f/4.0 - 1/60sec

I saw this wall near the entrance of one of the buildings when we went on our tour of the grounds. I took this picture of Arielle and knew that this would be the background for the portraits. Window light is coming in from the right.

I'll write more soon showing more portraits and talking about what was going on as I shot the portraits.

JIM baker

03.16.10 - as promised another Africa blog SUNDAY morning

Sunday morning, Brian and Devo introduce themselves and are interpreted into Swahili to the congregation of over 600 people.

Worship was loud and joyful. Click here to see a video of some of the kids dancing.

Bishop John brings one of the students forward whose parents were killed in the election violence.

Second time preaching a sermon and I preached to a church of 600 in Kenya. I brought a simple message of God's love for them and their authority as sons and daughters of Christ. I also encouraged them to dream big dreams because we were all reaping the fruit of John Okinda's big dream.

Brian blows bubbles with some of the kids after the service.

Heather and Arielle are asked by the students to sing the US National Anthem... the students respond by singing theirs. Click here to hear them sing it.

Jess serves some of the female leaders in the church cookies. I will let Jess write a blurb about what she experienced here and post it soon.

While Jess and Anne were talking to the female leaders, Brian, Dave and I were talking to the pastors.

I was utterly humbled by this group of pastors. When I asked them to articulate their struggles as pastors someone stood up and said that their main struggles were as follows...

1. Our congregations are made up or orphans and widows 2. They have not eaten and do not have money for food 3. They do not have clean water

The group was so hopeful and I reminded them that without the supernatural intervention of God nothing would change. If Jesus could turn water into wine and He said that we would do greater things then maybe we need to be using our authority to be turning dirty water into clean water. A bold thing to say but it flew out of my mouth.

The group really wanted ownership of what they were doing and were not just looking for handouts. They were so grateful for the things that we were assisting them with but desperately wanted to become self sustaining. We were handed a micro-finance proposal.

While we were there we were able to buy them 3 acres of land with a river running through it which will start them in agriculture so that they can be self sustaining.

During this pastors meeting is when I first started to feel sick... I left this meeting to go to the bathroom and it was all down hill from there...

I'll post more soon and promise to leave all of the graphic sick stories out of it.

Take some time after reading this to pray for the pastors and church in Kenya.

JIM baker

P.S - leave COMMENTS!

03.02.2010 - more about AFRICA!!

Anne our team leader giving Bishop John a laptop that many people from Praise Fellowship helped buy him! He just kept saying "praise God, praise God" over and over again.

Before every meal someone would pour HOT water for us so we could wash our hands. There was only one source of running water on the grounds.

A shot of one of our meals. Rice, mango, french fries and chicken. African chicken is TOUGH.

We were given a tour of the grounds. This is one of the student dorm rooms. The dorm rooms held 10-12 kids.

Oh the joy of digital photography. Dave shows some of the kids a picture he just took of them.

The only source of clean running water. A well that is overused every day.

A student sits alone in a classroom to study. Bishop John's school has some of the highest test scores in the nation.

We went to the NAKUMATT which is similar to a Costco or a Sam's Club. It was about an hour drive to get here but everything was much cheaper in price compared to the local markets.

Brian piles up loaves of bread for a special treat of peanut butter sandwiches for the students. (Pictures coming soon!)

Each student got a bar of soap, a roll of toilet paper, and a bar of laundry soap. We spent around $1,000 USD on food and supplies. I asked Bishop John how long what we bought would last. He looked at me and said it would last about 3-4 days. Food is not cheaper in Africa. And when you feed 300+ people a day it gets expensive FAST.

JIM baker

02.15.10 - Okay finally a BIT more about Africa and some pictures

The Africa team and some of the staff gathers at Praise Fellowship on Wednesday Jan 27th to pray and say goodbye to family.

A shot from the window of one of our 3 flights. Which I don't remember.

Brian Adelgren getting his Kenyan phone set up in the Nairobi Airport.

Jess, Arielle, and Heather waiting patiently as our driver pulls up to take us to the AIM Mayfield Guest House.

The guys room complete with mosquito nets. Make sure you use those!

The dinner they served us at the guest house. It tasted more Mexican than African.

I'm going to try to go through the trip day by day with pictures and captions so you can get a feel for the trip a little better. We had 3 flights. Buffalo to Newark. Newark to London/Heathrow. And then London Heathrow to Nairobi.

The Newark to London flight was on a newer 777 and had individual touch screen tvs in the back of the headrests. Jess loves movies and long flights so she stayed up the whole flight and watched movies. I snoozed a bit and watched one movie. On this flight they served us chicken tikka massalla. I was pretty stokked about that.

The travel wasn't bad at all. Rick told me to avoid caffeine on the flights and drink tons of water and get up from time to time and move around and sleep when I could. Staying hydrated on the flights made them a lot more enjoyable. We arrived at the Mayfield Guest House in the dark. A few of us ate some dinner and showered and went to bed.

I'll write more about the day after this one tomorrow!

JIM baker

02.08.10 - 3:47am

Jess and me right before we left Masai Mara

Its 3:47am right now, jet lag. At least I'm not up with a stomach ache like I was last night.

Africa was awesome. We were so blessed to be able to go. John and Pamela Okinda are doing AMAZING things for the kingdom of God. Our team was so honored to come alongside them and provide any help we could.

It was a quick ten day trip, but I feel like we accomplished a ton and learned a lot.

While we were there John and Pamela invited another 4 orphans into their own personal home. They now have a total of 12 orphans living with them.

I'll write more about the things we did in future posts. Consider this an introduction.


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From a photography standpoint...

I took 4,427 photos while we were there. Most of them, portraits for sponsorship of the nearly 300 students that John has.

I set out to take 10,000 pictures, or 1,000 a day, but wound up getting diagnosed with malaria last monday and spent quite a bit of time in bed.

The 5dm2 and the 24-105 treated me real well, I'm VERY glad I was able to get the new camera before I went.

Masai Mara is AMAZING. I seriously highly recommend going if you ever have the chance to go. It was a great way to end our trip. I had no clue that you actually got THAT close to the animals.

I'll post soon about more photography thoughts I had while in Africa.

JIM baker

01.27.2010 - off to kenya

a graphic my dad made for us :)

Jess and I are off to Kenya today. Please be praying for us. We return in 10 days.

Wanna read about what we'll be doing there? Click here.

If there's internet where we are I'll do my best to keep you all updated, but no promises. Check the twitter feed below for the most recent updates.

JIM baker