'The greatest job'

I took these shots at a DARE carnival -- a traveling parking lot affair which was sponsored by the local police DARE people, which is how they fund their program now that most federal and state funding has been dropped (mainly because it's been proven to not work at keeping kids off drugs). I took many of the photos for the officers themselves as a favor, but was basically there for the newspaper.

When the DARE officer thanked the newspaper for attending I replied that we wouldn't ever miss out on a chance to photograph kids on carnival rides even if the benefit was to keep kids on drugs.

Anyways, we always take more shots than run in the paper, so I thought I'd post some of the better ones here. There was this one real cute girl who was super excited to ride on the carousel with her mom and I thought it would make a nice photo.

While I was taking the shots, just after I asked for her and her mother's name from her father, he looks at me and says: 'You have the greatest job.'

I don't know what his job is or how boring it may be, but he's certainly right that, sometimes, being a newspaper reporter/photographer is the greatest job in the world. Not always, but sometimes.

A different set of rules

Ever notice how it often seems there is one set of laws for ordinary people and another entirely for government workers? Any regular Joe or Jesus would be ticketed for having this much solid writing covering his rear window while driving.

My digital evolution

When we moved to the smaller place, we had to move fast — too fast to go through enough of everything and pare it down to just what we felt like we really needed or couldn’t let go of. So the other day, I looked at the 5 or 6 boxes or crates in the middle of the living room and realized that, A) most of them were full of my stuff and B) most of what was in them was photo related: cameras and accessories, stacks of negatives and piles of prints and slides.

I’ve been a photographer since I was a senior in high school and through most of college and much of my adult life I used photography in my work. But it’s an expensive hobby (or at least it used to be) and for some time I didn’t do much with it while I was in and out of work. When I came back to it working for The Wake Weekly, I found some things had gotten harder — autofocus makes focusing either far easier or far more difficult, depending on what you’re trying to do. But mostly, I found it makes photography a hell of a lot easier.

Gone is the need for purchasing films of varying speeds and processing and printing that film. Gone are the hours in the darkroom or photo lab. Gone is the need for negatives, contact sheets, and light boxes and loupes for viewing miniaturized versions of one’s images.

So, after years and years of holding onto those proofs positive of a bygone era, I decided it was time to let some of it go. A lot of it, actually. I sold my black and white enlarger, developing tools and related knickknacks to a girl who is obviously much more of an artiste than I am — developing one’s own prints; seeing the image reveal itself in that faint red light is and will always be pure bliss. I threw away all of my grandfather’s remaining Canon equipment, at least half of which was older than I am; ditched three(!) old tripods and one monopod; trashed two flashes and a decayed Quantum battery; chucked unmixed developer and fixer, unopened packs of photo paper never exposed to the light and rolls of film that still smelled fresh but probably would never be used again, and packed the rest of it up for the move.

Now we’re here though, I’m going to rid myself of even more. I threw my Hoya filters in the trash (what a Hoya could do before, Photoshop can do after) and threw out anything that could be used to house a photo or negative that didn’t look clean. I then gathered all the prints and negatives together, not to mention my surviving Nikon F2, FM2, 200mm and 300mm fixed lenses, 500mm mirror lens and sundry accessories, boxed them up and put them in my closet.

My goal is to — eventually — go through each envelope of prints, throw away anything that’s not worth saving, put the negatives (also, only those worth saving) into sheets for filing, and then begin to scan them into the computer (such as the above shot of the twin towers the owner of Louisburg's Wammock Utility Buildings put up the week after 9/11/2001), so I have access to them in this digital age.

I hope to make some albums on Flickr, blog others, e-mail some to friends and family and store the rest digitally and hope to God solar storms or some other catastrophe doesn’t come along and send us back to living like cavemen.