A week or two ago I was sent up to Colonial Beach, the so-called Playground of the Potomac, to get a picture to illustrate a story about some proposed beach ordinances that on face-value, appeared to eliminate fun and/or shenanigans at the beach. Locals the reporter and I spoke to suggested it was directed specifically Latino people.  I suppose the bottom line is why would you do anything to drive tourists away, especially these days when a place like CB could benefit from those who would ordinarily be going to the Outer Banks or Delmarva. Anyway, here’s the photo I came up with:

Pedro Marquez, of Manassas, gathers up his fishing poles after fishing along the Potomac River in Colonial Beach, Va. on Sunday, Aug. 30, 2009. Several ordinances have been proposed that would restrict certain activities including fishing from the beach. (Mike Morones/The Free Lance-Star)

I’ve said before that I like shooting sports and some days a bad game is still better than some of the dross that passes for journalism but I think I need to draw the line at high school volleyball. I think part of this stems from my lack of interest in this sport and part of it is the awful high school venues – bad light, cluttered backgrounds. All that aside, in an effort to clean up the ugly backgrounds, I went up into the bleachers to shoot down on the action and came up with this:

Colonial Forge's Erin Godshall (#12) and Morgan Hymes (#15) collide as they both attempt to return a shot against Mountain View on Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2009. (Mike Morones/The Free Lance-Star)

Despite my dislike of volleyball, here is a series called The Season by my friend Scott at the Chicago Tribune about a high school volleyball team. Proof that sports is about so much more than just game action. Good stuff!

*thank god for football

I tend to get down in the wintertime. I guess it is the cold and the gray skies. My wife on the other hand told me she can’t stand the summer, especially August. Come to think of it, I don’t like it either. And not just because I sweat like a pig at a sausage factory.  I think it’s because there is no football. But that is all behind me.  Football season is in full swing and I am beginning to get into midseason form. I must admit my first two weeks were pretty ugly – think of it as the photographic version of the Redskins!

Plus I decided to change up my approach. Last season I toted a 400mm lens to most of the games I covered and the ‘look’ began to get a little stale so this season, I decided to go a little looser with a 300mm. The longer lens gave me a little less reason to move around and find different angles. I would sit in a general area, pop on a teleconverter and wait for the action to come to me. Now I’m staying much closer to the line of scrimmage and moving more. So thank you to SI’s Robert Beck and his article at sportsshooter.com for motivating me to change up my game!

So here are a few pictures from some recent prep games. The puddle one was from the first game of the season. I think its an ‘almost’ -too quiet a picture for the paper. Probably too quiet a picture to ever see the light of day, really. I think I need to make an effort this season to take some time at each Friday night game to make more ‘flavor’ pictures. Mostly because the action is usually fairly lackluster. That is my mission tomorrow night!

Massaponax players, reflected in a puddle following heavy rain, watch their teammates warm up prior to the start of Friday's game against Spotsylvania. (Mike Morones/The Free Lance-Star)

Christian Barham, center, and his Eagle teammates listen to the pregame prayer before the start of Fredericksburg Christian School's first football game. (Mike Morones/The Free Lance-Star)

Chancellor's Tony Russell tries to avoid Massaponax's Andre Wyche on a punt return during Friday's game at Massaponax. (Mike Morones/The Free Lance-Star)

Massaponax football players lay their hands on a stone with a plaque honoring Ryan McGhee, a Massaponax graduate who died in Iraq, before the start of Friday's game against Chancellor. His jersey, number 33, was also retired. (Mike Morones/The Free Lance-Star)

Note: this post has been sitting in the drafts for a long while – not sure why. -mike

With my wife very close to completing her capstone project for her master’s degree, I thought it would be a good time to get out of town and let her have some peace and quiet to finish up. Plus I had a ton of vacation time accrued and my brother was getting ready to move into his first house. I packed up the truck and headed south to Savannah to help him move and paint his new place. On the way I was obligated to get some tasty BBQ.

In between moving and painting I got hooked on a couple TV shows and a video game. He put me on to Squidbillies, an animated show about redneck squids in Georgia as well as the HBO show Eastbound & Down which was created by and stars Danny McBride, a native of Fred Vegas. It is about as crass as you can imagine and of course I find it hilarious. Plus I like McBride – I think he’s funny as hell.  I wish I had shot a better picture of him when he came through town a while back. Oh well…  I also spent an inordinate amount of time in Savannah playing a video game called Fallout 3. I have been a fan of Fallout since the original came out for PC something like 10 years ago. I am proud to say (in a geek way) Ned and I had Wasteland – the basis for Fallout – for our Apple IIGS in the late 80’s.

I drove on down to Venice to visit my grandparents for a couple days as I hadn’t seen them in a while. While there, I sat down with my grandfather and recorded an interview with him about growing up on Long Island in the 20’s and 30’s through the end of his service in the Navy in World War II.  Next time I’m down I hope to record another interview detailing the post war years as well as my grandmother’s recollections of Long Island, meeting my grandfather and her time working at the Merchant Marine Academy. I’ve been meaning to do this for a couple years after hearing about the Story Corps project. Growing up my brother and I would always press Pop for ‘war stories’ and he would talk about being in the South Pacific on one island or another or on the USS Northampton. In addition to gathering some audio, I copied a bunch of old photos.

Here’s Pop (left) in San Francisco, 1942 with a buddy from the Navy. When I asked who the woman was, he kind of smiled and said, “Va-va-voom!” The inscription said it was taken at a bar called Benny the Bum’s. I found a reference to the bar here that said it was located at 181 O’Farrell St in SF. I guess its a condo now. Anyway, hopefully soon I’ll take some time to edit together some audio and put some pictures up.  Here’s Pop outside his Florida home, putting away his flag for the day:

I returned to Savannah to finish helping Ned when he told me he had taken a job at Fort Rucker in Alabama working on helicopters. Sounds like an awesome gig, so congrats to him. I guess it is kind of crappy timing though. Oh well – maybe I can win the lottery, become independently wealthy and buy his house from him. Right. The upside is that I will have an opportunity to travel to Alabama and ideally make some time to head west and explore the Mississippi Delta. Upon my return kelly and I went canoeing on the mighty Rappahannock River with some friends from work. It was a lot of fun as it was a beautiful day and the river wasn’t too hairy nor too low. Seven hours on the water is a long time though. maybe next time we’ll go for a shorter trip…

On a technical note, most of those pics were taken with my iPhone aside from the copy shot of Pop. And I used the TiltShift app on this last pic. I’m having fun playing around with the camera function on that phone… a definite time sink!

I went back to the grind and as always, my first assignment back made me want to go back on vacation! I won’t subject you to the actual image but here’s the assignment: “Pontiac is going under. Localize!” So there you have it.

It seems like every time I get around to updating this thing, I preface it with ’sorry I’ve been away’ or some other excuse for not being a regular blogger. For a while I got hung up on Twitter and Facebook, both of which are simultaneously entertaining and eternally frustrating. I guess it speaks to the idea of digital overload and too many outlets and deciding where stuff should go – do I tweet this? do I put it on FB? do I blog about it?

Another reason for the lack of posts is that in my opinion I haven’t shot anything worth a damn in a very long time. I mentioned this to my boss the other day after spending two weeks as the photo editor while he was out of town. I said I felt like I had been shooting a few good assignments but nothing that really stands up beyond the next day’s paper. Perfectly serviceable pictures but easily forgotten.

A while back I thought it would be good to post a picture from every assignment – good bad or ugly. Well, let’s say I just couldn’t take the ugliness anymore!  That and the paper instituted a new social media policy. It isn’t as draconian as some organizations however it was a bit ambiguous as to what I could post on this blog. What was clear was that I could not post stuff here before it runs in the newspaper. As it turns out, lot of the stuff I’ve produced lately has not been on deadline and when it finally does run, I forgot I even shot it.

And finally, the main reason is that I’ve been kind of depressed lately about the business in general and preoccupied with my place in it. I read on another blog – forgive me, I forget which one – a sentiment that really resonated with me, especially after hanging out with some old photographer friends from my college newspaper days. Of them all, I am pretty much the last one actually doing journalism. A few are commercial photogs but everybody else is onto other things. Anyway, the sentiment was that nobody ever got into photojournalism for the money. We knew we wouldn’t get rich but we had the expectation that we could make a living doing something we loved; connecting with people, taking readers to places they could not go to, opening them up to their neighbors, creating understanding, erasing ignorance or moving others to action. Not to mention it is just a cool job. What other job allows you to be in other people’s shoes every day?  So we’ve got this job that we love doing it so much we often put it over our personal lives. We love it so much we keep doing it, even when it doesn’t love us back – and that is the part that hurts so much right now – is that no matter how much we get abused – furloughs, lay-offs, pay-cuts, doing more with less, some of us will keep coming back for more. Why? Because we believe in what we’re doing, we believe in the power of the storytelling, whether or not the newspaper business implodes around us. Unfortunately for many that resolve is crumbling. If you had told me ten years ago that I’d still be in newspapers. I would have rolled my eyes and said of course I will. I would have told you that not only would I be in newspapers but I’d be at the Washington Post or New York Times covering a war in some third-world hole, shooting meaningful pictures during the day and carousing with my fellow photographers at night.

Instead, I find myself questioning why I keep doing this. Why bother if the newsroom leadership is primarily concerned with keeping costs down and filling the news hole with content that is good enough instead of being relevant to our readers? As long as I can do it in 40 hours – excuse me, 37.5 hours now – per week, that will be sufficient. Bang out a few portraits because there isn’t enough time to actually cultivate a story, hit up some prep sports, do a drive-by building mugshot or a quick-hit picture of some construction. Wait, haven’t we done that story? Doesn’t matter? OK, put it in the paper anyway. Do more with less? Two plus two now equals five? Of course it does, but only if you manage your time better. Thank you sir, can I have another?

The reason I return, black-eye after black-eye, is that I can’t figure out what the hell else to do. Sit in a cube, pushing papers or crunching data? No thanks. I’ve done my time in a cube-farm and I’ve shot enough portraits of cube-dwellers to know that is a slow death in the American gulag. So here it is, the rub: I think I’ll probably go down with this ship of fools if only because I still believe.

My first NFL game of the season was a long day. One of the reporters and I left Fred Vegas at 8:30 am for the 4:15pm game in East Rutherford, anticipating at least some traffic. As it turned out it was a smooth ride all the way to the stadium. This was my first visit to Giants Stadium. The photo workroom was cramped and with all the Jersey and New Yawk accents flying around, it sounded like something out of the Sopranos or Goodfellas. Which to me was kind of comforting being from outside Philly. Sometimes the yalls, drawls and bless-your-hearts get to me after a while.

Aside from nearly getting run over in the first quarter, the game itself was pretty tedious with no real great plays. Of course the one play that really mattered happened when I decided to put some faith in the Redskins offense and moved ahead of the line of scrimmage. Had I stayed where I was, I would have been in a decent position to get the Giants stripping the ball from QB Jason Campbell and running it in for a TD. Though a little while later I was in a good spot for kicker Hunter Smith to score a TD after a fake field goal play.

Anyway, it was a mediocre game with mediocre pictures. After I filed, I went up to the press box to wait for the writers to wrap up. We were the last ones there and when we finally left, it looked like a nuclear bomb went off in the parking lot. Piles of charcoal, broken bottles, abandoned grills and our car. It didn’t appear anybody left any bodily fluids on it, unlike our last trip to cover the Eagles/Skins. So we hit the road, finally getting home close to 4am. Long day but an enjoyable one.

Washington Redskins quarterback Jason Campbell #17 fumbles the ball in the second quarter against the New York Giants at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ on Sunday, Sept. 13, 2009. (Mike Morones/The Free Lance-Star)

Washington Redskins punter Hunter Smith runs into the endzone for a touchdown following a fake field goal in the second quarter against the New York Giants at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ on Sunday, Sept. 13, 2009. (Mike Morones/The Free Lance-Star)

The following photo isn’t really that great a picture but it beats the photo of the actual touchdown. I sent the horizontal version but I cropped to a vertical just to see and now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t have sent the vertical instead. What say ye?

New York Giants wide receiver Mario Manningham #82 celebrates with guard Rich Seubert after Manningham scored a touchdown against the Washington Redskins at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ on Sunday, Sept. 13, 2009. (Mike Morones/The Free Lance-Star)

Anyway, so there you have it – Week 1. Clearly I’m shaking a little rust off so we’ll see what happens this Sunday at FedEx Field.

Those Left Behind

Members of Ryan McGhee's family and those who served with him in Iraq and Afghanistan.