What's Wrong with this Histogram?

I'm working with a Python program that produces freq below. There are 32 bins. The bins represent 0-7, 8-14, ..., 248 - 255 of a set of frequencies (integer counts). 0 to 255 are the brightness pixel values from a 640x480 frame of b/w pixels. I binned 8 into each of 32 bins. One can easily see that the various bins are of a different height. However, the result is fixed height bar from 0 to 10, and a shorter single bar from about 120 to 130. The x-scale goes from 0 to 140 and not from 0 to 255, or somewhere in that range. It seems like hist is clumping everything into two groups. I've changed the range parameter several times and get the same result. I'd send an attachment of the figure, but that often seems to delay a post in most of these Python mail lists.

freq = [127516, 8548, 46797, 46648, 21085, 9084, 7466, 6534, 5801, 5051, 4655, 4168, 4343, 3105, 2508, 2082, 1200, 488, 121, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
fig = pylab.figure()
v = array(freq)
plt.hist(v, bins=linspace(0,256,nplt_bins+1), normed=1, range=(30,200))
pylab.show()

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