Photographed the State 3A and 4A high school Swimming Championships last Saturday. I really enjoy photographing high school sports as there is a pureness to it that doesn’t seem to exist at other levels. I saw a lot of acts of good sportsmanship and came away feeling hopeful and impressed.

Every day is different in the world of photojournalism.  One day you may be photographing the governor and the next you’re covering the U.S Snowboard Grand Prix.  Many days you’re on a wild-goose chase, tracking down images to tell the story.  This was the case last week when Pat Parkinson, county reporter, and I traveled to Coalville in search of mink farmers.

Mink farming has been a staple in Summit County for nearly a century, and Utah is the second-largest state in America for mink.  Summit County is the home of the Blackglama, one of the most desired pelts in the fur industry.

With all these farms you’d think it would be easy to contact a rancher, but these individuals rarely talk to outsiders and especially not the media.  So it was a complete shock when Parkinson and I were invited in to one of the oldest running mink farms in America.

New post on Igloo Chronicles, “At the Mink Farm.”

Sometimes you should listen to you gut instinct. Other times you shouldn’t. I don’t know why, but I went for the latter the other night.

It wasn’t anything major or even worth mentioning, but I should have brought in my 300mm to the wrestling match….

More on my blog.

A quick quote from something I just wrote on my blog:

Any editor will tell you that there are times that a photographer needs to hit a specific shape, especially in a scenario where the photo is coming in on deadline. But such pre-planning should be the last resort. Editors of the world, you are lowering the quality of your photo report every time you give a photographer a shape to shoot to. You cannot accurately predict the shape of the best photograph and when a photographer is limited to a specific shape, he/she will not be able to do his/her best work.

Link: A Mid-Vertical Rant | Fly on the Wall

My lady friend recently finished this multimedia story on a man named Maurice Simpson. Simpson has a genetic disorder called neurofibromatosis that causes nerve tissue to grow tumors on his face. Here is the article where you can also view the video (there is a full screen option).

I’m posting it because, let’s be honest, we all know she is not very good with the Internets…

Here’s a good 1st person article written by the members of the Deseret News who traveled to Haiti the past couple of weeks.

Click Here to read the article.

From:  http://arafiqui.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/to-hear-or-see-a-haitian/
“I can’t think of another craft so immune to self-analysis, so trapped in its tired cliches, and so determined to just carry on as if nothing around it is changing. This is made even more evident when an occasional voice speaks up and reveals the sheer exploitation, and misuse of it all, as the photographer Eliza Gregoryso beautifully revealed in a piece she wrote called Photographer As White Messiah: Looking Back At A Picture I Wish I Had Not Taken. “

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Is that who we are? … Who we’ve become?