It’s hard to believe I’ve already been here in Peoria one month. Time has flied because it only feels like my first or second week since I’m still figuring out the newspaper’s work flow. When it comes to my work, I’m my own worst critic. I’m brutal and harsh because I badly want to improve in a highly competitive industry. I’m ticked if I hit a single since I’m forever swinging for the fences. Sometimes I have to step back and take a look at a group of work as a whole as a sort of self reality check. Here are a few of my favorite frames from my first month interning in Peoria:
Miscellaneous
My embarrassing photo moment
Watching a YouTube video of a wedding photographer backpedal into a fountain the other day reminded me of one of my most embarrassing moments. A couple years ago Barack Obama made a surprise visit to the Little 500 bicycle race at Indiana University. At one point I got in front of him in the infield of the track, about 8 feet away from him and backpedaled to get him in the frame with a long 70-200 lens. I didn’t realize there was a chair directly behind me and – yep you guessed it – I went down. Even better: I have a shot of him pointing at the chair (second frame down). I guess I can tell my grandchildren that as a journalist I stood toe to toe with Obama … before falling over a chair in front of him. I recovered and got a couple decent shots out of the day (last two shots).
Holga truck
Right now I’m in the process of scanning my Holga negatives, including shots from five rolls I shot in Europe. Here’s a frame that I posted earlier on the blog, except it’s now in full resolution and scanned properly:
A new perspective
One week from now, I’ll be in Salzburg, Austria. I’ll be there on vacation with my parents as part of a post-graduation/35th wedding anniversary trip. Although I’ll technically be a tourist, I’m hoping to make some images that are not typical of tourists, but are more photojournalistic in nature. This week, I took a look back on some of my photos from a 2007 trip I made to Europe when I studied abroad in Austria. I was definitely in tourist mode, but on second edit I found a few decent images from the trip: