The first baby of the new year, with parents at the hospital. I look forward to this assignment. It's usually a gentle reminder of exactly what photojournalists do, the basic marking of the passage of time from day to day and year to year, life and death. 2008 had a lot of that for me.
I also like this shot because it reminds me of a renaissance madonna painting, the tones of the clothes and cabinets, the bright blue heart monitor.

Hungry Koi, hoping I was going to feed them, for a story on decorative ponds.

Daring painters work high above the the downtown street. A different view of a landscape I have to shoot dozens of times a year. Also an example of my tending to shoot more with long lenses this year, something I worked a lot with.

A Red Shouldered Hawk, glaring at me as I inch closer and closer. It was sitting in a tree on a highway exit ramp, I saw him out of the corner of my eye as I drove past, parked and tried to sneak up on him. Fat chance, he soared away seconds after I took this.

A series of local politicos on the opening day of the General Assembly. It's a day of little moments, pomp and circumstance, shaking hands and jokes, before the bloody work of legislating begins. That's what I tried to show here, although my paper usually just wants the opening ceremony.

There's a great Bodine photograph of a manhole cover in the center of a street, with the double line painted over it. Some workers had clearly removed the cover for some resaon and then replaced it with the lines now running parallel to the rest of the road. It's titled "To Hell With It", and it's an elegant commentary on a certain kind of work ethic. The kind that would, say, make a plastics company dump tons of raw plastic refuse from their factory, for decades, along an abandoned railway next to the Patuxent River. So much plastic that eventually the trees grow around the materiel, like weird neon fruit .
It's also the kind of work ethic that when the county decides to transform the abandoned rail line to a recreation trail, a good idea, somebody decides that nobody needs to actually clean up the area, just to lay the trail directly through the debris field. No need to bother with informing the public about the pollution either, who is going to notice? The hell with it.
When newspapers are gone, these are the kinds of stories that the community will never get.

A nice long snow shot, I like the yellow on white of the bus and headlights. It was pretty cold. Later that day I got to ride around in a snowplow, below.

A double homicide in an apartment complex, middle of the day. No known motive and no arrests yet. Not a great picture, and I'm really trying not to exploit this tragedy. I wanted to say something about the banality of murder, how we live with it all around us, and even though it entertains us every night, our neighbors still die every day.

The bass player for the Side Affects, a teenage punk rock band who won me over by putting on the best show while simultaneously getting thrown off of a county wide high school battle of the bands for performing a song called "Sex Addict".

A Navy diver comes down from the top deck.

A cargo ship runs aground near the Bay Bridge, and pops out of the water as the tide lowers. I shot this from shore on a rock piling, and like the neat composition here.

For a photo illustration in a story on bullying, I went to a Boy Scout meeting and asked them to act out picking on one of their own. They took to it almost too readily, and actually started getting physical with it before I stopped them.

The Valentines Day warrant sweep. Cops posing as delivery drivers for flower shops, and getting folks with outstanding warrants to sign their names on the clipboard before cuffing them. The sheriif's first name is Ron, "Arresting Bouqet", they were having a blast.

A State Police Medevac pilot prepares to lift off on an emergency rescue. These guys have had a hard year, with a fatal crash and political investigations of their spending and effectiveness. Listen, I've watched them for almost ten years now, they are performing miracles every day in Maryland. You want to raise my taxes by 20 bucks a week, I'd pay it to keep them flying.

Just a neat shot of something called a Zograscope, an antique 3d viewer.

For a story about a the cutting of a medical program that send nurses into the homes of at risk mothers, usually teenagers, and teaching them about prenatal health and infant health, especially about how to avoid SIDS. A program that literally saves babies lives, and it gets eliminated.
On working on this story, the reporter discovered that the mortality rate for African American babies in our area is substantially higher then for white babies. It makes me sick to even think about how this can be. So I proposed to an editor at the paper that this fact seems like a good starting point to do a really in depth series of stories about health and African American children.
The answer was no.
I was told, in a phrase that I won't repeat, that we write about the death of black children often. Too often, in fact, to bring up again or make a big deal out of.
You want to know why the newspaper industry is dieing? Because we deserve it.

A construction worker is forced to get creative as he smooths out concrete poured for a new sidewalk.

Watermen listen glumly to DNR recommendations at a DNR meeting about setting limits to the crab fishery. These men have been to too many of these meetings for too many years, and the writing is on the wall. Either strict catch limits kills them, or harvesting the last crab will.

A couple takes advantage of the privacy provided by an umbrella in the falling rain at the annual Navy versus St Johns croquet match.

In shooting a lot of the same thing, in this case baseball/softball games, you have to amuse yourself. Here is a season long series where I set out to capture the best pitcher shot, using the extreme foreground batter and catcher as the framing elements. One is pretty good, but two is the best. Three is second best, and four I pushed it too far and lost it completely. I got caught too, legendary Governors photographer Tom Darden called me and nailed me on it.

A family holds and pets their bearded dragon after fire fighters pulled it alive from their burning home.

A May Day basket hangs on a white painted brick wall. One of my favorite shots of the year.

Who knew they would be so LOUD?

The Chinese religious group Falun Gong stages a demonstration. I'm not sure about the facts about Falun Gong, but I am sure I was discouraged by an editor from covering this event.
"We don't cover demonstrations anymore".
Um, yeah, we do. All the time. A reporter overheard the discussion and got involved, heated emails flew. I've discovered that I'm not so good in these conflicts, so I left and just shot the demonstration. I turned the photos in and they ran, inside, but they ran.

Shooting the same assignments year after year leads to some odd talents. I try and pay attention and do better from one year to the next, but I never thought I would be able to say, "Yeah, I've gotten pretty good at shooting the Blue Angels aerial acrobatics."

Tim Russert giving a commencement speech at a high school graduation, a few weeks before he died. This was during the height of the Obama/Clinton battles, and he had to leave as soon as he spoke to get back to DC. He gave a good speech anyway. RIP.

The parents and grandfather of a young man killed in Iraq by a sniper, with a quilt made from things he was proud of and scraps of his uniform. The stories about survivors years after their loved ones deaths are often more painful then the initial funeral stories, but just as important.

A graduate is helped by his mother and teachers to rise with his diploma at a graduation at a school for the disabled. As I've said in previous years, this is one of the best assignments to cover. In a world of gossip and storytelling, the weight our neighbors bear silently goes unreported.

An attempt at a different kind of sports shot, trying to break the paradigm of shooting every game like it's the SI cover.

From a series on boats passing under a tall bridge, I leaned over and shot straight down as they passed underneath. For no story, I was looking for a different way of showing life on the water. It was ok, maybe I'll reshoot it later this year.

A Jack Russell retrieves the disc thrown by her owner at a "Regional Championship" for such things. I love how humans apply competitive terms to the pure joy of dogs catching frisbees.

Homeland Security paid for these police cameras overlooking downtown, but not for an officer to monitor them. So they are only good at catching criminals after the fact. And maybe it was worth it, they did catch the man stealing money from the parking meters.
The police installed the cameras without any public announcement, and no civic debate. We found out by accident that they existed. Then they wouldn't tell us where they were. I had to walk the streets and find them myself.
Whether or not we have street cameras is less of a concern to me then that the police thought there was no need to inform the public that they were there. Without newspapers, how will the public hold authorities accountable for what they do ? Bloggers?

From a story on comic book collectors, "not just for kids anymore". I'm a huge geek, but this life-size bust of Wolverine goes too far even for me. He appears to even have plaque. Does his mutant healing factor apply to dental hygiene?

An immigrant holds up his approval letter granting him legal residence in the US at an independent aid center. The more I see of Hispanic immigrants, legal and otherwise, the more I like. These are good people, and we are a better country because of them.

An osprey lands at it's nest atop a light pole at a local high school field.

The commander of an Army installation at a press conference/luncheon. Basically everyone was asking him, um, lets say "softball" questions, when my reporter slammed them by demanding an explanation as to why the Army had been clearly avoiding cleaning a pollution site. Not this guys fault, he just took over, but the moment was priceless. Again, accountability, thats what newspapers do best, that's the reason they're hated by the powerful. Accountability.

From a story on life and troubles in public housing. This story is very, very hard to shoot. First it's physically difficult, not even counting the potential danger of crime (actually low), in that a lot of people in public housing do not want to be photographed. Who could blame them.
And frankly, it is young black men who should be the center of these stories, and they are the most resistant to the idea. I snuck this shot during a block party.
Any amateur can go into the projects and take arty pictures of poor black kids smiling shyly at the camera. What kind of story does a picture like that say? Are we saying that black people in public housing are essentially children? That's the message that comes across.
The young men, the ones we are most afraid of, that is the story we as an industry fail to tell. We are afraid to even admit we are afraid.

Hurricane Hanna was a tropical storm by the time she got to town, but it was still impressive.

Like the Blue Angels, I never thought I'd be able to say ,"Yeah I've gotten pretty good at shooting pig races."

More long lense work, this one is pretty successful. I love all the details of all the people at the carnival. I keep saying someone needs to invent a wide angle telephoto. (Thats' a photo geek joke.)

Talking about the Obama election. You can say first black president, but I didn't understand what that meant until I talked with these folks.

A nice reflection on the walls of a skating rink.

The sad funeral of a midshipman who died of meningitis, of all things. Even the weather seemed to be mourning.

A drug dog looking for contraband in a public housing project. This is the other way to approach the projects, from the police's point of view.
All that aside, I really included this photo to show off the D3's night shooting ability.

Waiting in line, early morning, Black Friday. In terms of telling the entire story in one photo, this one does the job.

This is a weird one for me.
I was in a hurry, I had another assignment in Easton of all places, and I had to turn something in before I left to shoot that. So here's this "holiday" party (really just Christmas) at a shopping center. Carolers and such, and a Santa. Without even thinking too hard about it I determine my composition and exposure, decide on my flash (up and to the right), and shoot the first kid to go up. Then I leave, turn this in with a few of the carolers, and get on with my shift. I thought it was a fine shot, but nothing special.
I have gotten more response and praise for this photo then anything else I've ever done. People stopping me in the halls, emails, people at accident scenes asking other photographers whether they were the ones to shoot that Santa. At first I was appalled, the things I stay up at night worrying about no one seems to notice, but this makes me a hero.
Part of it is probably that since I'm Jewish, I have no personal memory of talking with Santa, it holds no nostalgia for me. But another part is a lesson I seem to need to learn over and over. My job is not only to photograph what I want to show, it is to photograph what people want to see. There is a balance there, one I need to pay more attention to.

A memorial service for those killed in Mumbai at a Chabad center. It was moving to see poeple of many different faiths come together for something that happened a world away.

This year's Naval Academy bonfire marking the Army/Navy football game.

A mournful candlelit walk to commemorate AIDS day. A shot that would never run in my paper, but one I'm proud of. Streaks of light in the darkness, as good a metaphor for my photography this year as any.
Or for my photography career, who can say. I've been optimistic for a long time about newspapers, but the past few months have shaken my faith. They might really go away. That would be a tragedy for our country, I truly believe that. Papers are the shoddy dam holding back a river of corruption and greed, the flickering spotlight on innovation and the brakes on radicalism. We need them, and will miss them when they are gone.
Thanks as always for the attention.

Minutes after his swearing in, Governor Martin O'Malley and his wife Katie O'Malley leave the state house through a gauntlet of various state police officers and troopers on their way to the Inauguration Parade.
I found this spot during the previous governors inauguration. After the media frenzy of the swearing in, on a large stage surrounded by preening dignitaries, freezing cops, frostbitten reporters, cyclopean photographers, and cheering supporters, the new first couple walk through the state house and out the back. It's not a staged media event, they just have to get down to the street to watch their parade. So two lines of police formed, and they walked by hand in hand. I like to think that this was the moment when it finally sinks in for any new governor, when all of their sacrifice and work pays off. I was the only photographer there. And even though the exposure maybe isn't the best I still like it best out of all I shot that day.

A Chinese dragon walks in the Inauguration Parade for new Governor Martin O'Malley.
When you shoot in a smallish size town you have to find new ways of showing the same locations. I love the state house in Annapolis, but as a photographic element it does tend to just sit there. So you have to find new things to throw in front of it, new juxtapositions. Why was there a Chinese dragon at the Inauguration? Only as I type this has it occured to me to ask.

A Navy cheerleader is lifted high into the air as the crowd of mids support the Navy Woman basketball team in the game versus Army.
I guess it's kind of a cheesecake picture, but I really like her "Lady Liberty" pose and the dumb enthusiasim of the mids. I cover the Naval Academy almost weekly, and sometimes find it hard to portray the humanity in the students. Probably because they are being taught to discipline themselves so thoroughly.

A worker spreads salt and uses a blower to clear a walk near the statehouse during snow flurries. I wanted to include this pic because it's just so lame. A Febuary afternoon barely visible snowfall, and it is my job to find a picture, no excuses. After driving around for an hour, finding nothing and knowing that the snow could stop any minute leaving me shotless, I find this poor guy doing the job he probably drew the shortest straw for. And here I come to immortalize the moment. Any other day I would have left him alone, but I was desperate and freezing and in a weird brain hole where all of my self worth involved finding a goddamn weather shot. He was a good guy and even gave me his name. So thanks to him, and everyone else who puts up with the crazed photojournalists.

To support a ban on human cloning, March for Life members gather at Lawyers Mall in Annapolis. It's an unconventional way of shooting a rally, I like the lights through the flag and the church steeple in the distance. I think it also says something about the isolation of the politically active, the rest of the world drives on by while they call through megaphones.

2007 Youth of the Year Christopher is embraced by his tearful mentor Reggie at a community award ceremony. This was an assignment that looked like there would be zero payoff, a long ceremony with nervous speakers behind a podium, bad lighting and no emotion. I could have left after an hour with a mediocre shot, a "this happened and there were a lot of people there" shot. But for some reason I stuck around, and just past the three hour mark this happened. A big guy breaking down and a wide smile at the cheering crowd. A lead picture rather then filler.

Blanca 4, with her brother Sandy 5, shows off her shoes at a homeless shelter in Annapolis. This was from a story on a shelter where the reporter and I spent a night at a shelter, I left at lights out but he spent the night. I know that pictures of homeless children like this one and the one below are more then a little cliched and manipulative, they really don't tell the complicated story of how our society can turn on a dime and leave it's luckless citizens with nothing, or of the misfortunes and bad choices that people can make.
But, pictures like these work.They hopefully reach through the blinders we all wear and touch our hearts. At least that is what I was aiming for.

From left Priscilla , Orville , and Carlos hold hands in a circle around the table as grace is said a homeless shelter.

Clowns put on their makeup in a truck container before their first show of the day at a traveling tent circus. I could spend a year following this circus around and taking their pictures, it's one of the highlights of my year. These clowns are all from South America, in fact most of the circus is from out of the country. I love the off kilter mirror, the hanging plastic mask, the trucking container dressing room. After I was done shooting we took my then year old daughter Ruby to the last show.

The winner crosses the finish line well ahead of the rest of the pack in the Girls Sprint Medley Relay. This girl was fast, and did it in a cold rain. I love the distance between her and the rest of the pack. My best sports shot of the year.

A multivehicle crash stops traffic on the westbound Bay Bridge.
End of my shift, late afternoon, and we hear the call for the accident, confirmed fatalities. We know that unless someone is already in the area, getting close is next to impossible. So we need a plane. After a dozen fruitless calls to area airfields, one of our reporters remembers a stunt pilot who keeps his plane nearby. The pilot answers the phone.
I think it took about 23 minutes from me sitting at the computer surfing around and waiting for the day to end to be tearing down a runway in a cherry red aluminum stunt biplane, camera clasped between my legs and frankly pretty scared. Stunt biplanes are not clunky Cessna's, struggling to get off the ground, they leap into the air like they've got rockets. Maybe two minutes later we approach the Bay Bridge, and I count at least five hovering helicopters in the area. It's disconcerting to look DOWN on a helicopter as you blast by at 200mph. We get to the accident and the pilot turns the plane on its wing and tries to circle as tight as he can. Now this plane is probably the worst shooting platform you can imagine. The canopy is so close to your face you can't use a long lense, and the plane can literally not slow down without stalling, and add just a tiny bit of turbulence, and I find focus next to impossible. The setting sun on the shiny tanker truck and spilled fluids make exposure a guess. We got in two passes before the flustered helicopter pilots complain loudly enough to air traffic control to get us kicked from the airspace, and I had no idea what I had caught or not. We land, I jump back in the car, and out of the whole thing I have three useable frames, barely. The entire event lasted about an hour and a half for me, from the first call to handing in the shots to the editors.
This is why I will never be able to work a normal job for the rest of my life.

Midshipman raise incoming Naval Academy Superintendent Vice Admiral Jeffrey L. Fowler's flag at the Change of Command ceremony at the Naval Academy. Not much to say, I just liked the ritual of the change of command, the formality and dignity. Typical Navy held photographers way back from the action, but I think I did pretty well with this one and the one below.

Outgoing Naval Academy Superintendent Rodney P. Rempt leaves the stage and life in the Navy after being replaced by Vice Admiral Jeffrey L. Fowler at the Change of Command ceremony at the Naval Academy.

High school grads stand in the blowing wind as they wait for the start of their ceremony. This is my second year of shooting this same shot at the same school, with the wind blowing the students gowns. This one is better then last years, so next years will be great.

A National Guardsman holds hands behind his back with girlfriend while waiting in line for a snowcone. The soldier is being shipped to Iraq in two days. I think I blew this assignment, the Guard held a family picnic just before their deployment, and I got plenty of shots of guys in uniforms with their kids. But this one was the closest I think I came to getting at the underlying anxiety in everyone's minds. I'm still not happy with it, though. I think the enormity of the event, of the war and the separation, got to me and I faltered. I should have done a lot better, I feel like I let these guys down, and in a sense I let history itself down.

The light in the cupola of the Thomas Point Lighthouse. I like the scale here, the mico and the macro. When the Sun did their story on the lighthouse their picture was similiar but better. I'm sure they never saw mine, but its funny how sometimes photographers think alike. One of my coworkers took a carnival photo that looked so much like mine from last year ( the one way below) I thought it was mine. I think I need to stretch out a little more.

As incoming Navy midshipman read their Reef Points while waiting for their haircuts, spectators press themselves against the glass doors to catch a glimpse of the induction procedure. Basically the same idea as the cheerleader pic above, and the next pic, trying to capture emotion and vulnerability in people professionally committed to not even admitting such things exist.

New Navy midshipman load their duffels onto a truck during their induction into the Naval Academy.

This years 4th of July, with a symphony playing in the foreground. I went to the trouble of bringing a tripod, but when it came time to use it I realized I didn't have the connecting bracket to attach to my camera. Good one. I ended up putting my weight on the camera as it sat on the tripod, and holding really really still.

Kyron 11 has his new tooth Sealant bonded by "white light" by a dentist. For a story on a free dental clinic. Wow, what a neat blue color in his mouth! Too bad the page designer put it on a black and white page!

The Capt John Smith shallop pulls into a city dock packed with spectators and a colonial band, with help from Governor Martin O'Malley. Basically a media free for all with boats jostling and splashing to capture the slow moving shallop as it came into Annapolis, O'Malley in a sleeveless tshirt pulling on the oars and singing. You've got to hand it to O'Malley, he's certainly more fun then Ehrlich was. I like the juxtaposition of history here, the waterfront and the boats. This is the kind of picture I see being hung on the walls of a bar in 200 years, the good old days.

Lane two keeps an eye on lane one as they leap into the pool in the boys 6 and under 25 SC meter freestyle in the Bronze Championships. Nothing earth shattering or too deep here, just kids enjoying life as kids.

The J30 class crosses the starting line at the Annapolis to Solomons Island sailboat race. I like covering sailing, I like showing how the boats fit into the nature they're at the mercy of.

Three boys hold up the lizards they have won at the Kent Island Volunteer Fire Carnival. I resolved to find at least one new fair picture this year, one I had never seen or shot before. These kids and their lizards did it for me. Exposures a little off, next year I'll try and get it.

The Kent Island team celebrates their victory at the Hero's Lacrosse League Pee Wee Division Championship. Yes, the cliched victory pile up, everybody loves it, that's why everybody shoots it.

A Lt Cmndr embraces his daughter at BWI after arriving from deployment in Iraq. Almost all returning troops come through our area, and the lucky ones have family to meet them. I think I did a better job here, with this one and the next, showing the effects of the war on the hearts of people. It was easier as they all had already made it back ok. As a new father, this image resonated with me personally as well. She gets bigger overnight sometimes, and I can't imagine leaving her for so long.

A soldier, right, gets a first look at an in utero image of his unborn son in a poster held by pregnant wife after arriving at BWI from his deployment overseas in Iraq.

High school football players run sprints during practice in the preseason. I like the composition of this one, that leg coming down in the upper right and then echoed along the track in the other runners, the school fading into the horizon.

Jennifer Scott, whose mother Elaine Buchanan Shereika was murdered in 1988 in Gambrills, talks about the sentencing of Alexander Wayne Watson Jr for that crime and two other murders. At right is State's Attorney Frank Weathersbee. This was a somewhat routine press conference that got very emotional. The murderer was already in prison for life for another crime, and even though the state wanted the death penalty the families of the victims didnt want to spend 20 years trying to get it done. So they settled for his admitting to the murders, I guess the word is closure but I don't know if it's even possible in this case. When someone breaks down like this in front of me, I find it difficult to raise the camera and do my job. I try and empathize with my subjects, to get into their worlds and tell their story from the inside out. Then I find myself here, in a world of grief and pain, and to take the shot feels like taking on a shadow of that feeling, if only for a second. But if she is brave enough to stand there and tell her story, I need to be brave enough to capture it.

A cataract extraction with lense implant operation. I really like shooting operations, the twin miracles of the body and science under lights so bright that the background goes black. I imagine that this is the worldview of the surgeon, focused only on the single element of the entire patient.

A WW2 submarine veteran holds his hand over his heart as the ashes of Rear Admiral USN (retired) Eugene Bennett Fluckey are carried by at his funeral at the Naval Academy. A highly decorated officer, as commander of the submarine Barb during WW2 in the Pacific Fluckey is credited with sinking more tonnage than any other US skipper. He also independently launched a ground assault on mainland Japan from his submarine, blowing up a troop transport train, the only American ground combat on home Japanese soil. I feel honored to cover lives like this, to mark their passing . I think thats one of the most important jobs of newspapers, to recognize what the rest of the world has forgotten.

SPCA dog Cookie sits for a close up as a Comcast videographer films her for a local pet adoption searchable feature. A cute dog pic to be sure, but to my surprise the Washington Post picked up the story off of the wire and man, did my picture look good in the Washington Post. The Post is my favorite paper, hands down. I'm starting to think that I may have missed the career paths that would put me there, and this isn't even exactly a foot in the door. But my face is pressed up against the window looking in.

The remains of a sedan that was involved in an accident with a van. Senseless tragedy, and it took me too long to get to the scene, so the only story to tell is this wrecked hulk and the fluids on the road. As Americans we fit the violence of the roads into our lives as the simple price to pay for our isolated convienence. It is insanity. Total insanity, but like standing on an Incan pyramid and watching a human sacrifice, thats the culture we have. I'm so tired of taking these pictures.

A harpist's fingers pluck the strings of her concert grand harp during a symphony practice. I really enjoy taking pictures of musicians, and I like to think it's one of my strong portfolio points. I get really into it, I find my shutter snapping in time with the music.

A dancer performs wearing a mask in a practice for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by the Ballet Theatre of Maryland. This and the next few pics were part of my best photo series of the year. This is a professional company but only barely. Dedicated artists making even less then I do. I felt bligated to make them look as good as possible, and at no fault of theirs I had my work cut out for me. To have the story out in time I had to shoot a rehearsal a week before the performance, so we couldn't do it on stage. I had to shoot in their practice space, which happned to be in the basement of an office building with horrible drop ceilings and worse backgrounds. The light was dismal and dim and murky. My solution was unusual for me, I set up two strobe lights pointing straight at the side walls, and the reflected blast threw dramatic shadows around their flailing arms. I think it worked out pretty well, which was a little bit of a surprise.

Artist Colin Lacey talks about his new show of drawings and paintings. Colin suffers from schizophrenia, but his work is incredible. Some folks are good at making art, but every once and awhile you meet the real deal, a real artist, the divinely inspired.I shot him through a window in a propped open door as he talked about his work. I was trying to say something about his struggle with himself, and about the world's struggle with real artists.

The Humane Society of the United States protests in Lawyers Mall, calling out to Gov. O'Malley to "stop the bear hunt". The next day was the opening day of the bear hunting season. Pretty much the only reason I went to cover this was that I was hoping there would be someone in a bear costume. It could not have been better.

Moira Lee, one of the Aerial Angels, performs on ropes hanging from the trees at the last day of the Maryland Renaissance Festival. I use to look down on the renfest, but I've come to love it. I cannot think of any other event where that many people come together to just have fun, and hardly anyone ruins it. The lighting is a pain though, the sunlight through the trees creates exposure problems I still havent been able to figure out. This is the kind of event I want to spend the rest of my career shooting, trying to capture and celebrate.

The county's oldest employee paints a wall in the county executives office. He talked about how when he was young he had to leave Maryland because the racism was so bad, and only decades later returned and took a government job. I guess things had changed, but he worked 30 years and was still painting some white guy's walls. Not to take away from him, he had pride in his work, and not an unaware pride. A pride that seemed to come from recognizing the ingrained racism in America and living a decent life in spite of it. This piece made me feel like I did at the submariners funeral, honored to be telling the story.

Former President William Clinton holds his hand over his heart as the casket of Admiral William James Crowe Jr passes by at the Naval Academy. An ok shot, but I was happy to get all of the elements squeezed so tightly into the frame. It took several hours of standing around and plotting out all of the "what ifs" of something that took less then two minutes.

Racing industry employees and supporters listen to live testimony from a hearing on slots legislation coming from a large speaker at a demonstration in favor of slots at Lawyers Mall. One of my favorite shots of the year, a lot of elements come together here for me. The slogans, the worried faces, the bent heads, the tangled flags and the roofless pillars.

The late afternoon sun shines on the turning leaves at the pond at the head of a creek oof of the Severn River. I didn't think much of this when I shot it, it was fun to get and pretty but it didn't mean much to me. I forgot it as soon as it ran, but a few weeks later a reporter asked me for a copy of it. She wanted a good copy of it to give to this couple. She said she had been in the house of an elderly couple for some story or other, and in their kitchen they had this picture taped to the wall. Nothing else, just this picture, and they would sit at the kitchen table and look at it. That's the best compliment I think I've ever had.

Navy's Zerbin Singleton, right, runs past an airborne Northern Illinois's Bradley Pruitt courtesy of Navy's Reggie Campbell, left. I'll never be a great sports photographer, I do a good enough job to be payed for it but it's not one of my strong suits. I liked this one, though. The balance of the composition is all wrong, and I was too high to get the bottom players arms on the ground, but I like the goofiness of the flying guy.

5 month old Kamari is held up by his grandmother at a table at a community Thanksgiving dinner. If it is a crime to shoot pics of cute babies just for the heck of it, knowing that all the rest of your shots will go out the window when the desk sees it, then I am guilty.

As fireworks blast into the sky, a stand in for the Army mule hangs from a scaffold above the bonfire at the Naval Academy, surrounded by a crowd of midshipmen. The annual tradition occurs two days before the Army-Navy football game. It was cold, and then it was very hot, too hot. Another nice compression shot, another nice exposure. It's funny, you really do get an instinct about exposure, I'd heard of it but never thought it would happen to me. Here I exposed for flames, highlight details, and fireworks. Of course, I should've used a fill flash to show the faces of the cheering midshipmen as well. Next year.

The streets of Annapolis are almost empty as the snow continues to fall. A nice parting shot, a light snow and holding hands in a deserted town. I'm pretty proud of this one, I can't tell you exactly why. Maybe it's from having been there, standing on the roof of a parking garage as the snow muffled all of the sounds around me, and looking down four stories and catching this couple walk together down an alley.As they came out onto the street they joined hands, and it seemed we were the only three people in the world. Even though they never knew I was there, we came together to create something, art or photojournalism or just a picture to hold the spaces in the paper between the ads.
I have a feeling 2008 is going to be a rough one professionally, too many fuses lit and I'm maybe too ethical for my own good. Well, it's either ethics, or the fear that by letting my subjects down ( and everyone is my subject), I'll lose the ability, the gift, to be be able to do what I try to do.

Shot this in the first week of '06. I was on my way to a high school hockey game when I saw the black smoke start in a parking lot. I'd given up going to auto fires, because by the time it comes over the scanner it's probably already been extinguished.But here I was as the fire started, and had to wait for the fire department to get there. The driver said the car "just started smoking", and then lit up.
See, I like this picture because, as corny as it sounds, I like covering fire fighters. They really do rush in when everyone else beats it, and this guy lugging a line in front of a blazing engine that could explode any second really clinches that for me. It's just a dumb engine fire, happens everyday. But everyday these guys do this crazy job, lugging themselves into crazy danger. I know thats really going out on a limb, "firefighters are good", but y'know. They are.

Good old snowstorm shot. I like this for a couple reasons. One, it was two blocks from the office. Two, it's got the 5 W's and the Y packed into a tight spot, always nice. Three, I love the workers on the left looking up, I think it implies a jagged telephone pole stump without having it in the frame. Four, it ran lead the next day, big and above the fold.And five, I did a food story in that Chinese restaurant months later and they had that front page framed and hanging on the wall.

The morning of the British "liquid explosive" arrests, and security at BWI airport goes bonkers. The single security line stretches from one end of the terminal to the other and snakes back again.
This was done on deadline, which means I had about a half hour to get to the airport, get a shot, and transmit back to the paper. I was a little freaked because normally you need an exclusive "clearance" to shoot there, and there was no time to get it. So I went with what Matt Button taught me, the one about it being better to ask forgiveness then permission. Marched straight in, shot everything in sight, no one said a word. Cool.
Of course, what was the point? Does anyone really believe that there was a "liquid explosive" threat that could be packaged into tubes of chapstick? The guys they arrested didn't actually have any, they just talked about how great it would be if they did. In '05 they used plain old backpack bombs, and thats been called "England's 9-11". Wouldnt any committed bomber do a variation on that? Look at all those people, waiting patiently for some homeland security ju-ju man to wave a wand of burnt forskins over them to insure protection from the terrorist hoodoo. This is the "duck and cover" of our day, magical and fruitless.

Teamwork playground-in-a-day construction. I think this has the feel of a Soviet propaganda poster, "Together We Succeed!" Hard not to get a good shot on an assignment like this.

A graduate of a special education school has his arm lifted in triumph by a teacher at the close of his graduation ceremony. Second year I've covered this school, and it's the best. Most graduations are kind of meaningless to cover, no matter what the school you'll see the same things over and over. This one is incredible, these are kids who probably werent expected to live to be this old, and the emotion in the room is strong. I like this shot because usually their disabilities make it hard for them to really express themselves in a way you can capture in frame, and here he pushed up out of his wheelchair and yelled in celebration. Makes a year worth of bs assignments worth it to capture this.

A modern dance performance to the song "Hide and Seek" by Imogen Heap. If you know the song, it's an acapella sung through a distorter, and the song was punctuated by the thuds of their feet pounding the stage. Sometimes, even though you're far from the stage, and never meet, it's like you partner through the lens and together with the performer you create an image.

Summer carnivals. They travel from site to site and turn the back lots of volunteer fire houses into Atlantis. Flashing lights, flimsy violent rides, goldfish bowls, screaming kids and teenagers either falling in love or fighting. You get the feeling that every person there is having a peak experience that they'll remember for the rest of their lives. I've got a ton of great carnival shots, but was outclassed this year by photojournalist Brian Krista. Again. Brian's Fair Pics

Kids chasing sheep at Bullride Mania. Backlit by the setting sun. I'm most proud that I was able to id all three kids after the event. Missed the sheep, though.

Most rural county fairs have a wide variety of competitions, from largest pumpkin to a photo show. I love the photo shows because I try and look for what it is that presumably normal (ie non photographers) people want to see in pictures, what do they value in an image. If I can assume, what I get from them is a profound appreciaton of the intrinsically beautiful. They say "Here is a sunset. A lilypad. A puppy. A mechanical feat. Here is something to celebrate, something that is beautiful". I try and keep that in mind when I shoot, what do people want to see.

Highland hammer tossing. The punchline goes,"You're Thor? I'm tho thor I havent been able to thit down for a week!"

Shooting fireworks is ten minutes of frantic positioning, chimping, swearing, and dancing around with a tripod while everyone around you stares straight up into the sky like Dawn of the Dead. Great fun, pushing your exposures to the extremes of your equipment, and strangly enough to get a good shot you have to slow your exposure time down, to capture the light explosion as a movement through time rather then an arrest. You'll notice that I am actually standing in the bay for this one.

Ok, here we go. One of younger reporters, ambitious with talent to match, wanted to do this story. He'd seen this young woman wandering the streets of the downtown, clearly a prostitute. He's struck up a conservation, bought her lunch. Turned out she was a homeless drug addict (crack and heroin), turning tricks to get from fix to fix. Not a friend in town, and clearly headed for an early grave. Like, by the end of the summer early. So the reporter wants to tell her story.
Now, my paper is a good paper at what it does. This is not what it usually does. In fact, the phrase "downtown prostitutes" had been used as an example of exactly the kind of stories we were not allowed to do. So there was that obstacle. There was also the ethical question of how to shoot it. Do you show her face, obscure it, what do you show her doing? It's a small town, and by doing this story arent we kind of taking responsibility for her? Was she capeable of making the decision to let us tell her story, would she understand the consequences of appearing in the media? And, how do we not tell the story, and have to report it when they pull her body from the creek?
A good editor told the reporter to go for it, and he'd try and get it in the paper. I had expressed interest and had worked with the reporter before, so he called me one late afternoon and told me to meet him at the old cemetary.
We had to wait for awhile, gathering hard looks from the locals. Not the kind of neighborhood you want to appear to curious in with a camera. She suddenly shows up, bouncy and distracted. Skinny, in a short denim skirt and black tank top. Her face was scored by several deep sores. Bright, pretty eyes. She'd just scored.
We walked into the old cemetary, making introductions. She lay down on an old crypt, raised in a mound so she could keep an eye out. I guess I knew what we were there for, but it was still a shock when she lifted a small, filthy crack pipe to her lips and lit it. I started shooting. She finished, and slumped back against the headstone. Her hair fell over her face, and thats when I got the shot we published, with the cemetary stretching off into the background. She was blurry for a few minutes, and then came back. We chatted about movies for awhile, and the reporter , gently and professionaly, asked her if she didnt think that she was going to die out there. I guess, she said, don't know what else to do. We walked out, shook hands, and I drove to a field hockey game.
The story ran that weekend, bottom of the front, with this pic and a closeup of her crackpipe inside. They treated it right, and it ran long with a sidebar on prostitution statistics. The reporter called her "Maggie".
When you work on something like, this, its all you think about until it runs. When it does, your focus moves on to the next deadline. We got a few letters, some good, some pointing out that the only diference between this girl and others in town for years was that this girl was white. True. A week or two later the reporter told me "Maggie" was in treatment, She showed up at office for a follow up with the reporter, I said hi to her in the wood paneled conference room. Things looked ok.
I'm not sure of what happened next, but next time I saw her was on television, being yelled at by a videotape. She was living in a "real world" house, going through withdrawal with a camera in every room and dramatic music cues with each edit. I'm not going to name the show, but it rhymes with Dokt Er Fill. I only watched a little, until she was being berated by the host for her lack of will by the host. From a screen, she was watching his face on the screen yelling at her. They had made sure to list all of her sins, the addiction and the sex, they had even gone as far as to take her to the cemetary and do the same shot we did. I assume, eventually, she got clean enough for them to claim victory and bring a tear to the eye.
I'll be honest, I feel bad. When I met her, she was going to die, from the drugs or murder or something. So, the story saved her, the image helped save her. Thats what I want to do as a photojournalist, change the world for the better. But I feel like we drew her into the world of shock culture, now she's on a display to be cared for and jeered at for her transgressions, a stand in for our own collective guilt in our own weakness. Before, all she could sell was her body, and now she can sell her pain as well. Good luck, Maggie. I'm sorry, I was trying.

Here's another pic, not published because it would show her face. Figure it's ok now.

A day on the beach on the Chesapeake. When it ran as the cover to a special section, someone in the art department cloned out the hazy sky with rolling clouds and bright blue sky. They later claimed that they didnt know there was anything wrong with doing that. Sigh.

Summer sunset on the regatta. It was even nicer than it looked.

Boats in the fog in Grasonville. This is where digital lets you down, it just doesnt have the grey range that film would've. Pretty, though. I also like it because it reminds me of the little Maakies tugboat in the Tony Millionaire cartoons.

A full size "ship simulator" at the Naval Academy. Computer, arch please. I asked the instructor if they get together at night and refight the battle if Midway. He looked shocked that I would suggest such a thing. I dont believe him.

Crowdsurfing Navy midshipman. Fire it up.

This photo was not submitted for publication. A candidate for the county executive office presses the flesh. What a hard thing to do. Hand out, trying to look everbody in the eyes at once, earnest and smiling for hours. And surrounded by an at best indifferent circle of lenses. Takes a comitment to something, public service, right? That'd be nice. He lost.

Strong autumn late evening storm blows through Annapolis, and I'm on the prowl for rainbows. Not this day, but someday I'll find it. To bring the flags lower I'm standing on the railing of an overlook, and it was probably a good 4 meters straight down. Can you tell the wind was blowing? When you've got a camera in your hand, you find yourself doing some foolish things. Still, look at that light.

A boy and his duck at a carnival. Sometimes, it's better just to not even ask, and to let the image speak for itself.

I freaking love this picture. It's a high school musical, and she's just in the chorus, singing from an aisle. Another peak moment I was lucky enough to grab, in a year where I was luckier then most. Thanks.