Daily Work

Ten Years Later

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 11:06:21 -0500

Today I was tasked with covering the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks. A decade ago I felt I had failed at capturing the effect that awful day had on my community. The images coming out of New York and Virginia were so powerful that I felt helpless. How could I compete with that? I told myself. Deep down, I knew my job was not to compete, but to add to to the overall documentation of the day. I made pictures, but none that really told the story.

I saw the opportunity to cover the ten-year anniversary as a partial reprieve. The day started with the photo to the right. A simple ceremony honoring firefighters and law enforcement became an iconic image of a firefighter supporting an American flag being raised between two aerial units. From there I went on to cover a remembrance ceremony surrounding a piece of steel from the World Trade Center, twenty-two immigrants taking the oath of U.S. Citizenship and a patriotic concert in a downtown Omaha park. Clicking this link or the picture to the right will take you to the twenty-five pictures I turned in at the end of a very long, but satisfying day.

Launch Party

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 08:57:11 -0500

Other than waking up at 3:30 a.m. to drive out to the Strategic Air & Space Museum, this was an easy shoot.
Spring break allowed two moms to bring their kids to the launch party for Ashland, Nebraska native, Clayton Anderson’s final shuttle mission.
In their seats when I arrived, all I had to do was hunker down in front of them, make a little small talk, write down names and wait for the launch.

One Amazing Kid

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:26:41 -0500

At the age of three, Clayton Hildreth was badly burned in a house fire. Doctors told his parents he would not live through the night. He beat the odds then and on Saturday, February 20th 2010 he beat them again by earning the rank of Eagle Scout. Only three percent of those who enter the Scout program achieve Eagle status.
I was sent to Clarinda, Iowa to cover his Eagle Court of Honor and was privileged to be present as his mother pinned on his Eagle Scout Medal.

Problems Solved

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:25:24 -0600

So far I’ve only posted when I had cool pictures to share. But more often than not, my job is little more than problem solving and today’s take is typical.
My first example, a story about the “Energy Star Appliance Rebate” is what I think of as a window dressing shoot. Make the appliances at a local home improvement center look interesting enough to carry a section front.
I played with the lines and repetition of the washer-dryer isle, waiting about ten minutes for a man and his red cart to drift through to add the shopper element to the image. Then I added a portrait of the appliance manager quoted in the story, leaving space on one side in case the designers want to drop the quote on the image. I finished it off with a detail shot of an Energy Guide label, giving the page designers an added element to play with. No award winners here, but as washer and dryers go, I think I made it look pretty good.

Oldie but Goodie

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 07:22:08 -0600

I had the most amazing timing on this story.
It involved he murder and disposal of four-year-old Brendan Gonzalez by his father, Ivan Henk. That’s him bursting from a Cass County courtroom after blurting out in court, "The reason I killed Brendan is that he was the anti-Christ. He had 666 on his forehead."
The first odd bit of timing was stumbling into the early stages of search for the little boy purely by accident. I was cruising for a feature at the time. Next came this courtroom shot. There had been several court appearances for Henk and in each case, he managed to cover his face as he traveled to and from the courtroom. When I got a run at him, I certainly didn’t expect anything so dramatic, I only wanted to be the first to get a frame of his face.
I stood with tv and other still photographers outside the courtroom and made a lousy photo of Henk going in. I had a strobe on the camera, my shutter speed was around 1/125th and my f/stop I think around f/5.6 to give me a little depth of field. There is never time during a perp walk to get fancy with the light, I just set things up to maximize my chances of catching a good frame of a moving subject in light that goes from dim to bright as tv cameras turn on their lights.
As we waited for Henk to exit, there was a commotion inside the courtroom. I was sure someone was attacking Henk. It all came bursting through the door and the scene fell into slow motion for me. I felt like I had all the time in the world to pick my frames even though the camera was firing at around eight frames a second. The first frame I thought, nope, not it. Second frame was YES! Third frame, face going down, not as good and I dropped to my haunches to shoot up then dropped my camera from my eye to shoot up from the floor. Then he was in the elevator and gone.
We all looked at each other, stunned, and I looked at the images on my camera’s lcd, and made a phone call telling the desk I had something special. I hustled to the public library across the street to use their internet still in that awesome, picture of a lifetime fog. As I bent down to pull my computer from the bag, the crotch of my pants ripped from stem to stern. The reporter appeared with his laptop. His pen had exploded in the pocket of his new Land’s End oxford shirt. We joked at the thought of Ivan Henk and the Devil having a hand in our wardrobe malfunctions.
Looking at the video of the incident on tv, I was stunned at how fast it all happened. How the two or three seconds of Henk and the deputies bursting through the door could seem like a leisurely stroll as I saw it through the viewfinder I do not know.
The last bit of odd timing was what ended up being the final day of the search for Brendan’s body in a local landfill. I’d shot volunteers combing through the trash and was using a phone line in the landfill office to transmit when I saw a car fly by. Somehow I knew it was Brendan’s mom. I tore down quickly and drove back to the soybean field that offered us an angle on the search teams (we weren’t allowed in the landfill) and made frames of the Cass County sheriff and the search team comforting Rebecca Gonzalez amidst the heaping trash. Brendan’s body was never recovered, but Henk was convicted and is serving time for Brendan’s murder.