Pano Pt.2

Little Secrets: Pano Pt.1

I borrowed a Hasselblad X-Pan during my Nat Geo internship and shot some color and black and white in my free time both in DC and Bolivia. It's always refreshing for me to use a new format, to see different and work on composing within a strange frame. These images were shot with Neopan 1600 and Ilford 3200 black and white film.

LookBetween

On June 11&12, LOOK3 hosted an experimental two night event to present the work of 90 innovative photographers on a farm 30 minutes west of Charlottesville. This initiative, which we are calling LOOKbetween, showcased early-career talent and engage the presenting artists with media professionals on practices and trends influencing the direction of photography today. The brave souls heading off the initiative want to turn the traditional mentorship model on its head and let the next generation of photographers, editors, publishers, curators, and media professionals share their vision for the future.

We all had a beautiful weekend. From talking with friends afterward, we all can't express enough how grateful we are for being a part of this and for being given the opportunity in our hectic lives to come together and reconnect. In short, it was a gigantic family reunion. I think we all walked a way with that needed inspiration. Special thanks to Jenna, Miki and Andrew for doing this for us. http://look3.org/events/eventslookbetween/

Little Secrets: Last DC Moments

Kenji, an awesome tech-saavy photo engineer at Nat Geo, let me borrow a Mamiya 7 during my last meetings at the DC offices. For a week I snapped photos here and there. On walks, with friends and around town. I hadn't shot film in a while, so there was something very liberating about using a new format. And if you look closely, you'll see that one of my stops before I left was the Nazi propaganda exhibit.

Little Secrets : On the Road '07

After finishing an internship at the Deseret News in 2007, I hopped in a car with two good friends and drove for weeks around the northwest. Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Washington, Oregon. A friend, Kristin Murphy, let me borrow her Holga and gave me a ton of expired film. It was careless, free and beautiful.

America reCycled

I just launched a Kickstarter project to raise funds to develop a really great Web site for my upcoming bike tour across America with my brother. Check out what it's all about here:

7dot7

Kids With Guns is featured on 7dot7 Digital Magazine under New Formats. Check it out, they are promoting some really great documentary projects: www.7dot7.net

Little Secrets

I've had rolls and rolls of film piling up since high school. All stuck in a plastic back with who knows what on them. Little secrets of my childhood. I threw them in a trunk a long time ago.

I started off shooting during family vacations with a cheap panoramic camera and eventually, my sister gave me our grandfather's old 35mm Minolta. I started dragging that around with me, shooting random pictures here and there. A lamp post, icicles, my brother posing with a snowboard. And once I actually considered trying to shoot for a newspaper, I picked up a digital camera and threw my old one in a trunk with rolls of undeveloped film. Thus began my photography career.

I pulled them out recently, brought them to the camera shop and scanned them with the kind help of my friend, Mike Belleme. Many were under or overexposed. Some whole rolls were black. Many showed age -- dirty, dark, grainy and mysterious. As I sift through them, I will post them here, show them to you, and remember.

I have only recently shot film again, with the kindness of Kenji at Nat Geo, who let me borrow a couple different film cameras. So, I will post film old and new, a delicious sandwich of sorts encompassing my digital life.

Hair for the WSJ

Matt Craig of the Wall Street Journal gave me a ring several weeks ago for a shoot about Dominican hair salons. Apparently they were posing significant competition to the African-American hair salons with less talk and speedier service. One of the ladies I talked to had been there for 4 hours already and wasn’t even done. “Speedier service?” I asked myself. I guess it’s all relative. I showed up the day before Easter and it was packed. I felt like a sardine in a school of mullet – a scrawny white male in the midst of a bunch of Latino and black women. It was hot and the fumes were intoxicating. But that’s what I like about this job, being thrown into totally foreign situations and navigating your way through. I took a deep breath and made some pictures.

Check it out here

Asheville: Lightness and Pain

"Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes." -The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera