Homecoming Parade

I've been slightly obsessed with the Diptych, but haven't really tried shooting them. It's mostly because I'm not really familiar with the concept. The pairing of two contrasting yet parallel images, however, is intriguing.


This one is sort of obvious, and I'm not really sure qualifies. Scott Strazzante's Common Ground provide's much better examples. More recently, Damon Winter with the New York Times put out a set of political pairings that are worth a look as well.

Marching Madness

Who doesn't love marching band? Well, me now after spending 8 straight hours editing video of the high school performers last week.

The final product, though, was worth all the time. It came out kinda long (like, super long), but I think it flows well and tells a complete story.

I tagged along with our multimedia production guru, Michelle Christenson, for this video. We both shot video and I was the lucky one tasked with putting it all together in some sort of coherent, watchable fashion. Success?

By the way, after all this marching band immersion, I decided to check and see how my old high school band fared this season. Turns out that they are going to state AND they are marching to a Sigur Ros song. Wow, I don't remember the band being nearly that hip when I was there.

Volleyball

I really don't shoot much volleyball anymore, but last night I got the chance to cover one local high school team as it made its push for the playoffs. I was inspired to try and shoot this with the same eye I shoot every other non-sport event. My first game out this season didn't go so well. I was a bit out of practice, and spent all my time just trying to get a decent, in-focus photo. Well, last night I arrived extra early to give myself more breathing room to shoot some different, non-action photos. Once the game started, I unfortunately snapped back into panic sport-shooting mode. So here are a couple of images I like from before the game. I'm no Damian Mulinix, that's for sure, but I still like them.


While I was shooting a less-than exciting society event tonight, I was pulled aside by two different people who commented on the volleyball photos. The first women said she was excited to not only see her daughter in the paper, but to see all the extra photos that ran online. She mentioned one particular photo (above) that she really liked. I was surprised. All of these were photo I really just shot for myself. The only reason I crammed them into a photo gallery with my action photos was so that I could share them on my blog. I guess I didn't think the average reader would appreciate something other than the standard game action we always give them. It definitely encourages me to continue. It also made shooting the society event tonight a little more bearable. Just a little.

Oh, Oh Its Magic

I set out to shoot some "magic hour" photos the other night, and came across this guy hunting for small bait fish. I was running late and almost missed the hour completely, but there's still a bit of magic in these photos, I think.

Waiting For My Rocket

I shot one of those rocket launches last week, where I had so much fun I threw together a little audio slideshow.

Sometimes I kind of forget how cool these can be, the marriage of audio and stills. They can sometimes feel trite, formulaic or just another chore in the modern world of a newspaper photographer. But for people outside newsroom (you know, those readers we're suppose to serve) these still have an impact. I got a nice little note from an instructor telling me what a good job I did and how much the students are going to "treasure" the slide show. It really made my day. Who doesn't want their work to have an impact like that? Yeah, its not some stellar multimedia piece on poverty or anything, but that probably doesn't make it any less important to these kids.