Brackets
I got a phone call last week from a mother who told me her 13-year-old son, Connor, drew out his bracket picks for the NCAA basketball tournament in her driveway using sidewalk chalk. It sounded interesting… so I went out later that evening to meet the kid and take a picture of him and his [...]
Repo Man
I went out with Frank Small at Xtreme Recovery & Towing for an assignment last week. Recovery is just a fancy way of saying repossess. If I learned anything that day it’s that Frank and his crew are very, very fast. They backed their modified truck to the car, hopped out and 22 seconds later they [...]
Breaking News – It’s Winter…
Every year we seem to forget that winter brings snow and ice. Wednesday I went up to Menards to get people buying snow shovels in preparation for their impending doom. Thursday I went out to shoot people clinging to their hopes of survival as they shoveled their driveways and sidewalks. I’m looking at my calendar [...]
Career Fair
I got to talk about my job with a bunch of eighth-graders during a career fair at Richland Community College this morning. I’ve done it for the past few years and it’s always a good time… I show some photos and let the kids check out the cameras, which usually holds their attention. One of [...]
Athletes
I recently shot a few of the portraits for the newspaper’s fall season area athletes of the year. Central A&M’s Evan Hayes (pictured above) was the football player of the year, LSA’s Morganne Criswell was the area volleyball player of the year and Mt. Zion’s Joe Fritzche was the boys cross country runner of the [...]
Overexposed in the Locker Room
That title is a little misleading, but my original title, “My Camera Settings Were Wrong and this is What Happened to My Frame While Shooting a Portrait of an Athlete in a High School Locker Room”, wasn’t as catchy. As you may have guessed from my scrapped title, I shot portraits of our Herald & [...]
Bringing The Wood
I meant to blog this game sooner, but it seems like every time I tell myself it’s time to post something my 3-month-old son wakes up and I end up falling asleep in the armchair while rocking him to sleep. While shooting the last regular-season high school football game between Monticello and Decatur St. Teresa [...]
November Already?
Every year I have the intention of getting some glorious series of landscape photos with beautiful barns on rolling hills of multi-colored trees. Every year I also forget that I live in central Illinois where Summer ends, the leaves start to change and then we get days of nothing but heavy rain and gusty winds [...]
Twitter Coincidence
I’m easily amused, so I thought the coincidence of these two Twitter posts being on top of each other was amusing. One, a story from my newspaper about the danger of chocolate to pets… just above that is a story from the Champaign paper about a bomb-sniffing dog at the courthouse dying. Then I realized [...]
Favorite Subject
This little guy has taken the top spot on my list of favorite things to photograph. Sure… he might spit up on me, suck on his fingers, slobber all over his outfit or cry after a few frames — but you could worry about any of those things with some of the major athletes I’ve [...]
Blog, We Have a Problem
So… in the process of moving my blog around I somehow damaged the database and I’m pretty sure I lost my entire blog. As far as I can tell all four years of pointless rambling is gone. I’ve racked my brain trying to bring it back but I don’t have the mental energy to worry [...]
Michigan State 24 – Illinois 14
Shooting Illinois football has been about as much fun as watching Illinois football… which means it’s sucked so far this year. On the plus side, I haven’t been booed at (yet) when I come back into the office. Saturday’s game was the first start for backup quarterback Eddie McGee. I think the coaches were hoping [...]
Eisenhower 20 – Urbana 8
Eisenhower High School hadn’t won a game in a long time. In fact, most of the kids on the team didn’t know what it felt like to win as a Panther… until Friday night. After losing 25 straight games they beat the Urbana Tigers 20-8. When my boss told me I was shooting this game [...]