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

The Woodlands Chalet

Family Vacation, near Asheville, North Carolina

Washington Post.

Legal Eagle

I made this picture back the days of my internship at the Monroe Evening News. I was at a marine's house for one of those freedom holidays -- I think it was the 4th of July. This was sitting in the corner of the room. It was caught and stuffed back in the day when they weren't so endangered. Even though they had this thing registered, every now and then they'd have neighbors report them to the EPA. The picture wasn't so interesting to me then, but I just recovered it and realize how strange it actually is.

Jeff Powelson for the Wall Street Journal

Building Mug for the Wall Street Journal

Kudzu for Nat Geo

The first day of my internship at National Geographic Magazine, I was sent out to shoot a picture of kudzu, the invasive vine that blankets vegetation. It's not the most invigorating subject in the world, but I set out at night to do some light painting to try to make it a bit more dynamic.

lost but found

I came across these images in the depths of my hard drives - Circa 2007 in Gainesville, Florida, when my way of life was engulfed by the college, with plenty of good friends and good times.