Catching up

So obviously I have failed miserably at keeping this blog updated lately. It's not that I haven't meant to, but you know things can get a little busy when you are constantly traveling between two cities and getting used to a new job. I figured I would start again however and post some of my most recent work, and perhaps keep it up enough to do a week-in-review type post every week. This week I have a couple from Thanksgiving when it snowed heavily here and then my favorites from last week.
All images copyright The Midland Reporter-Telegram.


This one is of the statue of Lady Liberty on the front lawn of the county courthouse downtown. Like any trained dog or photojournalist I know that when I wake up and it is snowing in West Texas, I will need a weather photo. In fact I will probably need two weather photos just to be sure. I went out early on Thanksgiving to get these since I figured someone from the paper would be calling me wanting a snow photo eventually and if I already had one that would make my life just that much easier. Plus I could shoot what I wanted and take my time without the rush of a deadline.


This is a Turkey Day photo as well. We knew that two of our larger teams in the playoffs would be practicing that morning. I was excited to shoot football practice in the snow since that doesn't happen to often around here.

Here are a few from this past week:


This first one is a portrait of two brothers who play football on the same team, which also happens to be the team their father is an assistant coach for. I included it because I am trying to better both my portrait and my lighting skills and I feel this one was a step in the right direction. I used one off camera strobe at camera right hooked to a pocket wizard (that's a brand/type of radio trigger used to shoot with your flash on a stand, hanging from a tree, tied to a lama, etc. etc. for the uninitiated). This light was mainly used as a fill light since I had some nice sunlight coming in from behind me that was perfect for my main light (as sunlight often is).


This photo is of a championship ring presentation ceremony for the local junior college basketball team. It's pretty cool shooting photos of a team that included several members of last years national championship team. With quality athletes come opportunities for quality photos if you ask me.


This is one of my favorite basketball photos I have ever taken. The intensity on the faces and the little details like the players tattoos just make this one of my favorites. It helps that we have some awesome strobes up in the ceiling to illuminate the player and throw the background into darkness. This has got to be one of my favorite parts of the job so far. I have always loved shooting basketball, and wanted to light the floor like this but was on too much of a students budget to afford to do it. My newspapers setup is really great. Shooting with the big lights does have it's downsides though. You have to get to the location early and climb up to the catwalks to manually turn the strobes and radio triggers on, and you can't exactly motor drive your way through a ton of frames as the lights need to recharge every few shots. My camera syncs with the flash at 1/250th of a second also, which is a little slow for sports, although this is a problem for most pro digital camera's nowadays. The good things is that the flash helps to stop the action, and I can shoot at f/4 or f/5.6 to get a little better depth of field and not worry about the crowd being in focus since they are underexposed from the 7th or 8th row on up.

Yeah, I really like to shoot basketball at my new job.

Dusting off the blogger account

So it's been awhile since I posted, and I don't really know why I quit. I think maybe it had to do with feeling that I didn't really have much going on at the time, but when I look back at it now I realize I did. I have been searching for a job for some time and and finally that search is ended. I am now working for the Midland Reporter Telegram, the daily paper for Midland, TX. I have already worked there most of a week and am currently back home in Abilene with the family.

Maria and the kids aren't moving up there with me until she gives birth to our third child the first week of November, so the next couple of months will be a little difficult. Those that have followed this blog for awhile now (insert silence and chirping crickets sound effect here) will know that my family has had to do this once before, when I interned at the daily paper in Odessa, TX. Coincidentally, Odessa and Midland are only 20 miles apart. Tough times are ahead but Mary and I have a strong relationship and our kids are young so they adapt pretty well. I won't be able to make it every weekend though and that's when things will get challenging.

On a purely blog related note, if I do start keeping this thing updated more I may check with the online editor so they can link to it from their local blogs page.

Inspiration from different places...

I'm not really a fan of rap music, but I do listen to some on occasion and I recently found a Jay Z song that has actually been some inspiration to me. The song is the last track on the "Black Album" and it's entitled "my 1st song". It begins with a clip from an interview by the Notorious B.I.G. where he is quoted as saying:

I'm just, tryin to stay above water y'know
Just stay busy, stay workin
Puff told me like, the key to this joint
The key to staying, on top of things
is treat everything like it's your first project, knahmsayin?
Like it's your first day like back when you was an intern
Like, that's how you try to treat things like, just stay hungry.

The chorus of the song is sung by Jay Z and it reads:

It's my life - it's my pain and my struggle
The song that I sing to you it's my ev-ery-thing
Treat my first like my last, and my last like my first
And my thirst is the same as - when I came
It's my joy and my tears and the laughter it brings to me
It's my ev-ery-thing.

(song lyrics copied from lyrics.com)

To be honest, the lyrics lose some of their effect when they are only read and not heard. The point is though, that every song (or for a photographer, every assignment) should be treated like it's the most important, like it's the first one. Even more than that, it's a reminder to keep up a good work ethic, and to push yourself everyday. Regardless of my opinion of the majority of Jay Z's music (and the genre in general), this song has been on alot of playlists on my iPod lately. I have let myself get into a rut in regards to my shooting; I just don't find the time to do as much personal work as I should. I am also getting a little to used to shooting 'grip and grins' for the university and I feel like I am getting complacent. Maybe this week will be the week when I break out of this rut, and when I can reminde myself to treat every assignment as if it were the first time I picked up a camera and had so much enthusiasm and saw the whole world through a new perspective.

The other point this song brings up is to remind me to ask myself this question: Am I hungry enough? Am I hungry enough for these jobs I am looking at, for the process of storytelling? How badly do I want to do this for a living? If at any point the answer is "not enough" then I think I will have to reevaluate where I am. Right now, I am hungry. A professor was suggesting to our class the other day that an interviewer was likely to ask the question, "Why should I hire you?...." and that we should have an answer ready. I think my answer will be that I am hungry. Hungry for this job, but also hungry to get to know a new community and tell the stories I find there. That I desire so much to work as a photojournalist on a daily basis, and to find a way to impact people's lives through my photography.

Coffee with an old friend

Today I had the chance to visit with an old friend, Brady Lane. I didn't even know Brady was in town until another friend told me he had come to speak to her class. Brady has been working at the Marshfield News Herald for the past several years. He and I were able to talk for about an hour, and I have to say that our conversation really helped me put my current situation in perspective. Brady told me that he was out of school for 9 months before he found his current job, and that he had been feeling some of the very things I have been as he searched for employment. I have been so focused on finding a job or deciding what to do after graduation that I have even considered doing types of work that I know wouldn't make me very happy but bring in some extra income such as portrait work or wedding photojournalism. I guess I thought that if I couldn't find a job at a paper by May then it was all over for me, I would have to sell out. I know this probably sounds stupid, but that's how I have been looking at things. I walked away from our conversation with a sense of relief, a burden had just been lifted off of my shoulders. I still do want to have a job lined up by May, but on the chance that I don't my life isn't over. So often we focus on one goal so hard that we get our perspective out of whack, and forget that there is a larger picture to look at.

We also talked about finding small papers that still put our good work, since I will most likely be starting at a smaller publication. It's good to hear from someone who has found one and encouraging to think that I can do the same. I felt that my photo editor from my internship, Mark, was one of those editors who pushed his photographers to keep a high standard and I hope that I can work for someone like that again. Overall, it was good just to hear from an old friend and catch up.

Some high school basketball

Last night I shot a game between Odessa High and Mansfield Summit High for the Odessa American last night at Moody Colliseum on campus. I really hadn't every shot any high school b-ball, but since the game was in a familiar venue I was used to the lighting and such. Here are a couple of the photos from the game:













Overall, I think I did ok, but I know that I can shoot much better photos at a basketball game. I had the same problem this past weekend when I shot two games for the university, I feel like my work was just good enough, but not excellent. I really need to step it up next time. I don't want to keep feeling this way after assignments. I'll see if I can post some from another assignment I shot this weekend for the university.

Expanding my mind...

Lately I have been feeling the urge to learn about graphic design (and design in general). I have also been experimenting with Adobe Illustrator for designing my new business cards and letterhead and such, which would probably explain my newfound desire. I have always admired graphic designers and other digital artists so this recent interest in learning more is not surprising to me. I bought a few books on Amazon to help spark my creativity and to educate myself about color and type. One of the books, the one I am currently reading, is really causing me to think. It's titled Thinking with Type , and it's really interesting material.

Like most ACU journalism students I thought Dr. Marler was a little crazy when he spent 3 weeks talking about typography during the Publication Design class, but now that I have a few years more life experience and a much different outlook on life I think the topic is fascinating. Not only is typography interesting but how the designer places the text and positions it, sizes and colors it all go into creating a great layout. Coming from a school newspaper background I know that the body, or text, on a page is an element much as the art or photographs are and not just linear text, but somehow the author of the book presents this idea in way that is new and refreshing to me. I'm not saying I am going to switch to page design or try to become a graphic designer, but I do feel that dabbling in these fields is beneficial to me, the same way learning to record audio or shooting and editing video are skills that improve my creativity and story telling skills. As I write this I am reminded of a time when I heard David Leeson tell a group of photographers that he wanted to live an artful life, and I can understand that. It's more than just being a good photographer, in fact if I only do that with my life I will be a failure in my own eyes. I would like to understand and appreciate the art that is all around me, from subtle beauty of nature and God's design for it, to the buildings I work, live and play in and even the objects/devices/tools I use in my everday life, everything around me has been designed to fulfill a purpose or to elicit an emotion or feeling. Realizing this, and tapping into it, might just be the greatest thing I can do as an artist.

Time flies

It's been awhile since I posted here, mainly because I haven't made much time for it. Another reason I have stayed away from the blog is that I feel like I might have gotten off track with it. In the beginning, this was supposed to be a photo blog where I showcased some of my more recent photos and blogged about them or the circumstances behind them. This was for a class. Then I started the internship in Odessa, TX and this blog became a way for me to share my experiences and work but ever since I came back from that experience I seem to have quit posting photos almost altogether, with the few exceptions being photos of my family. Part of the reason is that at times I was busy shooting events and such that payed the bills but did not always produce work I deemed original enough to post here. Lately, however I have not been shooting much at all, I seem to have hit a dry spot in my personal creativity as well as my freelance opportunities. While I have no doubt that I will overcome both of these problems (this isn't going to be another whining post) I just haven't had much to put here. I have had about a billion thoughts in my head that I could of posted, but I am still unsure of where I want to take this blog.

The thing about it is that I find blogging my thoughts to be helpful and enjoyable. Often while I type out a question or describe a problem I begin to realize the answer before I am finished. So I guess the whole point of this post is to let anyone who actually reads this know that there will be more photos in the future, but there will be more "photo-less" posts as well (and probably some more whining for good measure).