Hope to Heartbreak...

The 'Hurricane'

I want you to meet Chaz Hurricane Sykes. He is from Saginaw and he is 6. "I want to be a boxer," said Sykes when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. Chaz received this unique middle name from his great grandfather whose boxing call name was Hurricane.

This is the portrait they ran in the paper. It wasn't my favorite of the takes, but rarely does the picture I like actually run. Non the less I love this photo because it to me it encompasses everything I'm missing in my life. I miss being a kid and having dreams. The older I get the more cynical I become. I'm afraid before long I won't have any dreams or ambitions left. The only thing I have in common with Chaz is a messy bedroom.

I guess in some ways I will never grow up.

Trying to keep my own eye the ball

My updates are far and few between since my personal computer decided it had enough. This has forced me to shoot all of my pictures on a 8 GB card. I'm running out of space and need to dump it soon. I also have wedding photos to finish.  The point I'm trying to make is tomorrow is my first day off in what seems a million years and I will hopefully get photographs edited and sorted and this blog updated.

On another note I feel myself growing and learning but I just fear the pace isn't soon enough. I've been searching for a story to work on in Saginaw but finding one is much more difficult than I expected. Saginaw is a weird town. So active, yet extremely dead. Extremely ghetto, and overly po-dunk. A city divided by a river. A good side and a bad side. It is a story DYING to be told.

How do you tell it? I mean it seems simple correct? I guess it all boils down to access and in all honesty the single thing that is holding me back from creating something beautiful. How do you enter into the "Woods" (East side river neighborhood known for being an extremely rough neighborhood) and say hey I'm white, but I want to tell people about you with out getting shot?

White people aren't held highly in the eyes of those on the East side and who can blame them? These are the same people who get away with corporate crimes, but face a fine and a few days in jail. Now contrast that to people living in burnt out homes stealing copper piping so they can eat at night and they face all kinds of charges.

The city is so racially divided it is unreal and I fear neither side cares to hear the others story. I hate the fact I have a dress code. I love dressing up for work, but try wearing dress clothes in area that is overly poverty stricken. I stick out everywhere I go and I hate that. How do you tell someone, "Hey I know what your going through, but I'm dressed like this." To them I'm just another white person using them for my advantage.

More to come I promise.

Nothing Says Labor Day Like Baseball

The only photo I wanted to create and didn't was a kid eating a hotdog with condiments all over his face. Nothing could have said Labor Day and better.

Winners and Losers

Last night I was faced with a reality check. It was late and sports was waiting on my photos, and I made the mistake of letting them choose from the top 7 of my photos. I was told we couldn't run a winning or losing shot because apparently that doesn't happen in high school sports.

I can rant and rave about how much I hate the politics of sports, but it won't do any good. All I can say is I hope journalist, young and old, start growing back bones before it is too late. The industry is changing and I can accept, but in some ways it is changing in the worst ways. I think we let the public decide too often what is news worthy and what is not. It starts with this sport ideology and then it runs into features, then spot news. It is a slow decent to hell. Just ask the auto industry what happened when they gave the public what they wanted, with GMAC pricing, and then came leases, and then came cheaper leases... but that is another story for another time, the moral is, "If you give a mouse a cookie, he is going to want a glass of milk."

It's So RAVEN!

Raven Symone everyone!

There are a lot of photos I need to put up, but simply finding the time in the day right now is just not possible. Wish me luck I start Monday at Saginaw.

The end of summer

I wish I had something great to show here, but I don't. I will share a few frames from a recent trip to Hale, MI. Don't ask where it is at because there is nothing around it. On my way home with Liz and Jess I saw a field of sunflowers so I did what any photographer would do, I turned the car around. The girls thought I was crazy, but in all honesty this made our trip complete.