shoot, shot, shoot

the other day i found a leaf - not yet turned brown and crunchy, but yellow, with deep red veins...too bad the red&yellow project just ran - this would have been a kind of cool addition, but like any project, it has to come to an end and simply get itself on out there - it still was cool to explore this leaf, me and lensBABY, that is....

back to work the other day - it was one of those days (which i actually like) where the assignments were just boom, boom, boom - one after the other after the other after the other - so much rather have a day like that than a slow day (yes, call me crazy, i actually LIKE to be busy! you know, not so much that i can't give each assignment its appropriate time and attention, but just enough to not be feeling guilty about sitting there in the office feeling like i have to justify my existence...in that vein, this day was, as Goldilocks might say, "just right")....2 of the assignments were pretty quick hits - shot pix of 5 kids at a couple schools wearing a Santa hat and holding up a sign bearing various numbers representing the days left til xmas - our annual "Christmas Countdown Kids" feature - like i said, quick, easy, usually cute...inbetween shooting 2 of those, i went to an elementary where 2 of the kinder classes were going around the neighborhood surrounding their school, hanging thanksgiving cards on the doors of residents' houses - the actual delivery of the cards was kind of a bust - i thought they'd be knocking on doors and handing them over, but it turned out to be more like following around a political candidate stuffing their lit into door handles, but still, it was kind of cool - made a couple pix i liked, like the little girl who collected leaves along the way until she had a bouquet-ful in hand

and this kid who got up close and personal with one of our newspaper boxes - "hello, hello, is anyone there?" he shouted, nearly sticking his whole head into the mouth of the box - if only he understood the cultural/newspaper industry irony behind this moment!

later, it was yet another flu clinic - i guess the newsworthiness of this one was it's the last one for the county this month - the H1N1 vaccine, that is - not nearly as crazy busy as the first, but still, this is the third of these i've shot this month, so how to do it differently - oh, ever the conundrum - last time, i didn't really shoot kids actually getting the vaccine - it was more about the turn-out, the lines, the long wait - so, i just decided to shoot the shot, so to speak - man, these kids (not just the ones i'm posting, but almost all of them) were completely freaking out -this little girl had such a high-pitched, prolonged shriek, i thought i might just be putting in for workman's comp over hearing loss by the time she was done! i mean, the power of 5-year-old lungs is seriously nothing to turn a deaf ear to, so to speak - ha ha

what killed me were the older kids, like 12, who still had to sit on their parent's laps and be semi-restrained to stay still for the shot - really, kids, you gotta be tougher than that or you're just never gonna make it in this world!

..........

today, a goofy assignment in the a.m. - something that should have been no big deal, kids working in the classroom, and it turned out to be a group portrait in front of a computer - just silly...nuff said, we've all been there...

later, i went to a Pow Wow at an elementary - i was looking forward to it, envisioning what cool things would be happening (journalism mistake 101) - i got there, and it was kind of a glorified song pageant for parents with kids in headbands with paper feathers sitting in a giant circle singing songs and then gathering for a picture book reading, and then they all lined up for muffins and popcorn with juice....hmmm, not quite what i had in mind, but i stuck it out, and then they did a little dance, which i didn't get anything too good of - a teacher apparently thought i just wanted to shoot this one kid and started pulling others out of the way (yeah, thanx - i shouldn't be a crab, they mean well), then another story, which is where i made the following photo

...and inbetween, as the kids were eating their "harvest snack," i shot something of the recess going on outside - i don't know what it is about this, i just really kind of liked it

....anyway, that's been the work week since my last post - just trying to keep things current, cos i know y'all are simply on the edge of your respective seats as to what the world of journalism brings me next! could it be, kim goes to a flu clinic? no way!!! kim went to an elementary school?! high school sports???? SHUT UP!!! oh no she didn't!!!!!

oh yes she did!!!!

oops, one more

realized that in my update, i left out sports, which is odd considering how much of it we've been doing - anyway, not stellar, but my favorite from saturday night, somewhere several hours away near the tip of the thumb - my michigan travels are growing! thx sports!

a hiatus, chosen, and then again, maybe not

i know that's a bit of a strange title for this thread...i suppose i should explain, so let me explain, no, let me sum up (sorry, i just had a "Princess Bride" flash!)...

ahem, so, i feel like the impact of our staffing scenario has been getting to me - frustrations, miscommunications (or no communications), a somewhat persistent sense of unease/unknowing, the feeling that you are flying without a net all the time coupled with never really knowing where the next trapeze bar you're supposed to be grabbing is coming from - if that makes any sense - anyway, for a good 2 weeks or so, i just felt like i wasn't making any pictures that i liked, that i was not only stymied but perhaps going backwards and that i was feeling a little too down and frustrated to do much about it other than being uncomfortable, unhappy, uninspired and just plain worried! by the time i got to a pre halloween party that turned out to be kids running like maniacs thru a gym with the activities being face painting, bean bag toss games and the giant inflatable slide, i found myself standing in the midst of it all, just trying my best not to burst into tears...

so, yeah, some serious frustration going on - none of which inspired me to post here - i mean really, the idea of facing a "photo-oriented" blog with no work i feel i can share is pretty much just a reminder of how unhappy you are with what you've been doing - i may have some self-defeating tendencies, but i'm not a complete masochist!

anyway, don't know what has happened, maybe it's the assignments recently, maybe it's me, maybe it's the weather, but things have been picking up some, and i've felt better about what i've shot, and i've, more importantly, gotten that spark of being excited to go out and make something good....so, even though it's no ground-breaking, prize-winning bit of photojournalism, here are some from the last couple weeks, mostly to catch up - you don't have to look at them all, or really any of them; in fact, if you've gotten this far into the post - well, god bless your kind, good soul, my friend!

guess i'll just start with the most recent and work my way back....

feature hunting for our community foto page since i'd made all the calls i had to do and no other assignments had come in - it was fairly warmish outside, so i found a few teens and their respective god-kids/siblings out for a "kids' day" of pizza and playground time outside one of our now no-longer used elementary schools, which is a sad story in and of itself - but, it seems the beautiful, architectural old building may have a new career of its own on the horizon - it is to be used in the filming of an upcoming movie starring Danny Glover and someone else pretty big - go, go Monroe!

veteran's day celebration at a local elementary school - kids, local/state pols, and then luckily later they let kids who had vet family stay and visit with them after the assembly

H1N1 vaccine arrives in Monroe County - people were lined up around the high school building, whose gymnasium was transformed into vaccine clinic - people were waiting a good 2 hours to get in for their shots, some of course to be told they didn't meet the requirements to be able to get it yet....good thing it wasn't horribly cold and/or rainy - if they weren't getting sick from the flu, they surely would have gotten sick waiting outside for 2 hours to get the vaccine!

before heading out to a volleyball game, i decided to put my down time to good use and go feature hunt - the night was rather nice, leaves had fallen en masse from recent rains and winds, and i figured i'd find someone outside doing something cool - i'd actually pulled over to shoot a family i saw out raking when i noticed these kids loading leaves into a wagon to pull to their house, so i just went with them - they'd decided to load up leaves from the nieghbors' yards, since theirs had all blown away - and they were having fun jumping into the piles, throwing the leaves skyward, and merely resting in them like a giant crunchy bed...ironically, the girl in the foreground i had happened to photograph with friends at a downtown pre-Halloween trick-or-treat event, and the girl in the background i'd shot the weekend before at the annual historical re-enactment "Lantern Tour" event, and to make things even crazier, it turns out i'd photographed the old barn in their backyard several years ago when we did a piece on remaining old barns within the city! so, this family has been well-documented by me, to say the least!

election night - the new mayor gets his props

shoot something that says "bus safety importance" for a recent story about how, due to the state's budget cuts, the bus inspector positions have been cut and no further inspections will be funded by the state for their state-mandated school bus yearly inspections - about 70 buses in Monroe remain to be inspected, but now the money is gone, and they are in the position of having to comply with a state-mandated safety program whose state funding has just been cut - not to mention what happens to all the buses next year - guess the schools, with their infinite budgets (all irony intended) are now stuck coming up with the funds on their own or risk being cited for not complying with state safety regulations - yet another wrench in the state's budget/education woes...anyway, just basically had to go shoot something of school buses, so i hung out at school's end at the big middle school, which gets plenty of bus traffic and looked for something moment and/or graphic that would illustrate the story - this kid plastered himself against the back window as his bus pulled away, which needless to say, given the nature of the story would have been a completely editorialized image to run, and we didn't, but it was a funny moment, particularly given that very story

Monroe's "biggest garage sale"

halloween - while scoping out a house to go to, i spied a bunch of costumed kids playing outside - their family and their friends and children were having a big pre-trick-or-treat halloween house party, and they let me come on in and hang out - shot that and then went across the street to shoot at what is probably one of the coolest decorated houses i've ever seen - these people went all out, very cool stuff, though i think they probably gave the local tots some serious nightmares!

a pampering day held for single mothers by an area church

while shooting a high school bio class out on a bird-watching field trip, we came upon this backwater pond in a clearing - just thought it was pretty

the annual Lantern Tour - one of those events that somehow i have managed never to shoot in the nearly 8 years i've been here - another record broken!

so, that's it for now - if you're actually still here and reading this, you are officially a good egg!

a few from before

losin a bit of steam on the prospect of doing a full post of recent work that has gone unposted - so, instead of going thru the whole rig-a-ma-roll, i'm only posting the ones that i kind of like....especially since i don't want to waste what may be the last nice day for a while...oh the pressure - what to do, what to do! 

cheerleading camp for tots

homecoming week kick-off before the morning pep rally - 50's theme

a walk in the woods

later yesterday afternoon, when our blustering winds died down for a while finally, i went up to a marsh preserve to take an autumn walk and have a birthday date with the lensBABY - much catch-up from the last 2 weeks, but i'm really not feelin too terribly into it at the moment, so i'm just posting this, along with perhaps of a pic of a new pumpkin species i have found this year (well, not like i'm a botanist who discovered it in the fields - i found it in the little farmer's market store, amidst their stacks of gourds, squash and other fall harvest) - some say it's ugly, but i think they look really cool - it's the ugly that makes them so interesting...

anyway, here it be, for what it's worth

the "peanut" pumpkin

hey forget about this one - while walking around at an orchard a couple weekends ago, i had to stop and ask this woman if i could take her picture - she was just too cute to pass up!

stuff

this week didn't get off to a great start - worked a semi-split on monday, since i was solo that day - wanted to go to the reporter's meeting and just check in on any potential daily assignments, and then volleyball that night - the day-side assn. turned out to be a bust - couldn't get it organized to write/shoot that day, so then it was just sports....i thought i'd try to find a feature at the game, since the story that didn't work had been lated to be page 1 - got to vball, was striking out on finding a feature, but that turned out to be a good thing in a way, because when i got back to the office and popped my card in, it came up 0 images in folder - what the heck? i saw the virus scan going through hundreds of files, so i stuck it back in the camera - same thing - zippo on card - man, what a sick, sinking feeling washes over you - i fire up Bryan's computer, since his has image rescue on it - but everytime i launch it, up pops the "application has unexpectedly quit" message - and after the 7th or 8th try, it really wasn't that unexpected anymore let me just say - turns out that was old software that wouldn't run on our updated macs anymore, so pretty much nothing i could do  - left the card and a big note and voice mails with everyone coming in in the morning - HELP and be prepared for no sports fotos for your section front....so that was monday - second work day in a row that i found myself leaving in tears....stinks.....

they were able to retrieve all the images on the card - i guess they can just essentially reformat themselves - haven't had that happen before - the good things out of all this are that they are getting us updated software so we can just take care of it ourselves right away, and i found a new spot i like to shoot volleyball net action from

yesterday was the opening of the new Walmart supercenter - woo hoo!!! there weren't the huge crazy crowds that i thought there'd be, but there's something just really funny about this moment that happened when i was hanging out trying to shoot the greeter - she looks about as confused as to why these people walked in and started pointing at her as i was! it's funny though, to me at least.....

later, one iof our reporters came over to say the fire investigators would be at the scene of an apartment fire that had happened the other night, could i go or should he shoot something - heck no - please, i mean we've been practically begging for things to shoot! so, i get there, and the investigator's just getting in, and the woman who lived there is there as well getting what she can salvage of her and her toddler son's belongings - they both made it out safely thankfully, but i can't believe they did! everything except the back bedrooms were charred and melted - her tv was just an amorphic blob of black plastic - and the paint was bubbled and peeling off the wall - furniture melted - just crazy, crazy what fire does to things....but, like i've said before, and as the reporter and i were talking about later, there is something strangely almost tragically beautiful about it all - but the smell, not so much - good god, i think i was tasting it for like an hour later....

the really sad part is that the fire started from candles she had burning in the living room - she was using them because she's had financial problems, lost her job, and she'd just had her electricity shut off - so it was the only source of light she had.....really tragic....and scary, because i burn candles all the time! to see what can happen if you're not really careful is just scary!

anyway, better day yesterday - no tears, actual assignments, even though i did try to do a little feature hunting later...to no avail...now that school's back in, the afternoons are a hard time to find anything going on....but i'm hoping for autumnish features soon - it's feeling like it...our weather has been that cool low 70's, sunny - perfect fall days! it's time to go for a walk in the woods or a pumpkin patch or something cool like that! i love the fall!

i like being a big baby - lensbaby, that is

i'm still finding inspiration in the flowers and lensBABY - i'm waiting for it to get old, but it seems like, given the right mind-set, i manage to find something new that i hadn't seen or shot before, which is pretty cool....i definitely need that kind of positive photo experience right now, because work has been, well, more a source of frustration lately than otherwise - i need to start taking some of those vacation days i have left, especially if i can't be using any of them for xmas, because i really need to clear my head right now and get a fresh perspective...i feel like i shouldn't complain or get down on things, because really just to have a staff job at a newspaper right now is no small feat in and of itself, but, as my mom used to say when we were sick as kids, "better out than in!" wise words indeed!

so, here's the latest from the lensBABY - the last is my favorite of the bunch i think