Take a breath...

In early July, due to a series of very strange travel arrangements made on my behalf, I found myself in International Falls, MN. On Memorial Day. As you might imagine, there really wasn't much going on in the town of 9000 as I checked into the Holiday Inn at 7:00pm and as it was 7:00pm, I was getting kind of hungry.

I grabbed a camera body & two lenses out of my backpack, got back in the rental car and as I often think when I'm on the road, "I'm going to go out & find something, and I'm going to eat it". It being Memorial Day I'm not overly confident, but off I go.

Half way between the hotel and 'downtown' I see an athletic park with a football field and a couple of baseball diamonds. I'm already past the entrance, but the rearview mirror shows me that there are two Little League games in progress. Up ahead is a Subway: Food and a place to turn around. I grab a 6" smoked turkey and a lemonade and head back to the park. Leaving 'dinner' in the car, I grab my gear and walk over to the nearest diamond. The infield is already in the shadow of the back-stop, so I walk around to the second field. There isn't a cloud in the sky and the light is just golden. It's pushing 8:00 by now and the sun is going down fast, but that light...oh, that light.

Sometimes, and much, much more often than it actually is, it should just be about the game. As I was standing outside the third base foul fence between #1's mom and #15's dad with a few mosquitoes and more than a few black flies vying for my attention, I remembered a story that quoted USA Today photographer Jack Gruber. "Back up. Take a breath. And just look around..." I've shot the big leagues, I've shot celebrities, and I'm currently working on a large portrait project involving Canadian Olympic athletes, but sometimes we get so caught up in the real world that we forget the REAL WORLD.