New Chapters
I shot a wedding this weekend for the paper. It wasn’t the ceremony, just a few last minute preparations shots for a story we did about June weddings. It was a bit funny since the photos ran on my first anniversary. Weddings represent a lot of things, and the main theme is change.
While my final day hasn’t been set, I’ll be leaving Grand Island. My wife and I are going to be moving to Albuquerque. She’ll begin as a full time therapist at Desert Hills, a residential treatment center, and I … well I’m still looking for something. I have a feeling that I’ll be working on digging up some freelance work and quite possibly shooting a few weddings. The other thing I’ll be doing is preparing to begin taking classes in PHP and SQL programming and other web based systems and languages.
The change will be awesome and we’re both looking forward to all of the possibilities while not getting too terrified of the uncertainties. Grand Island over the past 10+ years has been wonderful to me and allowed me to grow as a person and in my profession. I’ll definitely miss it here.
Party like it’s 1910!
This past weekend was quite busy. My wife, Jessica, officially completed her Masters of Social Work Degree and we traveled to Kalamazoo to party with my Nana who celebrated her 100th birthday. She officially became a centenarian in January, but the family got together over the weekend for one heck of a shindig. Her three children were there along with six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, plus nieces and nephews.
You can’t celebrate her accomplishment without looking back on what all has happened during her lifetime. She has lived through the horse and buggy era, the early years of flight, two World Wars and the Depression. Not to mention the post war ’50s, the volatile ’60s, the economic difficulties of the ’70s, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush and now Obama who wouldn’t have been able to vote when she was born.
It all makes you wonder what changes my generation will see over the course of our lifetimes. A child of the ’70s, I’m already a witness of globalization, computerization and 9/11. Whatever happens with the economy and job market we are currently facing, we cannot be stymied by fear and trepidation.
In an episode of Sports Night, the plot revolves around Y2K and fear about the new Millennium. Isaac Jaffe, played by Robert Guillaume, isn’t fearful at all. He says (and I apologize for the poor paraphrasing), “It’s going to be great. A hundred years ago I couldn’t vote. Bring it on.”
Bring it on indeed. Happy Birthday Nana.
Mike George—MMA Fighter
I had the pleasure of meeting Mike George this week. He’s a native of Grand Island, now living in Hastings, who has become a professional MMA fighter. We shot this portrait after he worked out at the Hard Knock’s Gym. This weekend he’s on the Tri-State Cagefighting card at the Heartland Events Center. Here you can read about Mike and see a couple of other images.
Maggie Fields
After the basketball tournament I came back to my first assignment: photograph Maggie Fields using an eye tracking system to communicate. The day was pretty open so I was able to spend more than two hours with the precocious youngster during speech, occupational, and physical therapy. She has an infectious personality, great big smile and brigth blue eyes. You can’t visit her without smiling.
Maggie, 4, choked on a bug when she was eight months old, cutting off oxygen to her brain. The result was various therapies to help her re-learn everything. But communication was tough. Last September Maggie started using the DynaVox Vmax with EyeMax system. The system has a camera that tracks her eye movement. When she holds her gaze over an icon it speaks the word for her. As Mark Coddington said in the story: “It’s opened up a whole new world of communication and personality that even her family members had never seen — all through those huge, bright blue eyes.”
Andres Gamboa
Had the good fortune to photograph Andres Gamboa last week for an article about him. We wandered around the school looking for a good location and were coming up empty handed. We ended up in the auditorium where we found a nice spot in one of the aisles. A couple of flashes and we had a nice shot to go along with the story about his life’s journey and many accomplishments.
