Push

A bump.
A nudge.
Something new.
Something different.
A change of perspective.
A change of pace.
Get pushed. Push.
Be pushed. Push back.

We must be awake. To be awake, we must be conscious. To be conscious we must be aware. And it is when we are aware that the senses come alive; colours are brighter, smells are so intense that you can taste them, and details that previously went unnoticed are suddenly everywhere.

A romantic notion? Fantastic? Perhaps. But to know with any certainty, you’ve got to get out there.

Do….something.

Make a difference.

Feel a difference.

Be a difference.

We're surrounded...

We walk through our lives our heads in the clouds, our heads in our hands, concerned only with our own little world, not knowing that we're surrounded.

You can't see it when you're in it, and when you're in it, there is nothing else. We're surrounded by what we have, surrounded by what we have not, yet we often don't realize that we're also surrounded by something beautiful.

We see and feel and breathe and hear, but it's gray. It's a blur. It makes no sense. There's no rhyme nor reason.

The trick is to take that little wink of beauty that we never expected to see, and to hold it always close. To find that subtle glint of light and use it to make something good. Good for ourselves, good for someone else. And to know that it's not a bad thing to suddenly realize that we're surrounded...

An object in motion

Newton's First Law of Motion in part states that "...an object in motion tends to stay in motion...".

I recently spent several days in New York City on a working vacation visiting with editors, photo directors and a few friends. And as the 5th anniversary of 9/11 approached, it struck me quite profoundly while I was there that Newton's Law clearly applies to New York. Having suffered what could well have been a fatal blow to the spirit of perhaps any other city in the world, the city that never sleeps, its head held high, stays in motion.

It has been many years since I last had the pleasure to visit and while most of the sights and smells and flavors remain, there is now something else that was not there before. A steely, reserved resolve to carry on. A dignity. A difficult to quantify impression that left a mark on me. One that said with calm, quiet assurance, "You're going to have to do a lot better than that...".

The interminable spirit of New York City is an object in motion. And an object in motion tends to stay in motion....

Saturday Morning Coffee

There are times when the world is rushing around me so quickly that I'm not entirely sure what day it is; only knowing where I need to be tomorrow and that I have a deadline the day after that.

It's times like these that I'll get up early, find a coffee shop tucked a little off the beaten track to sit and step out of the world for a little while before the crowds wake up just to clear my head and remember the important stuff.

It appears I'm not alone...

About looking...

I shoot Major League Baseball quite a bit. I love shooting baseball. I love the sounds of the game, the feel of the game, and the look of the game.

Something that never ceases to cause me great wonder is all in the details. I go to a game and often don't even know what the final score is. The nature of a lot of my assignments allows me not to know, or care what the final score is until later, and I can easily get that information from sources other than the scoreboard. Because I often have that luxury, I can slow down a little and look at the details. The little things that all too often go unnoticed and unseen.

Then there's the essence of the game. The smell and sound of the game in a photograph. I would love to be able to capture the sound of a baseball hitting a catchers' glove in a photograph. The crack of a bat in an empty stadium is an amazing sound & I'd love to freeze it in an image.

In the mean time, there are those details. Batting helmets on the dugout steps. The big basket of batting practice balls. The batting gloves hanging off the knob of a bat in the rack. The details. It's all about looking....

Tennis, anyone?

The New York Times assigned me to cover the Rogers Cup women's tennis tournament here in Toronto this week, specifically to provide new images of some of the top seeds for their upcoming US Open preview. It was a great assignment because I only needed to focus on one of the players in any given match, and because the preview isn't coning out until next week, I wasn't on deadline.

The media people at the Rexall Centre were great, helping out with additional power outlets for laptops & battery chargers, and getting glitches with the wireless network straightened out very quickly.

The assignment was a lot of fun and it allowed me to play with a few different things like slowing way down on my shutter speed when I photographed Serena Williams' match against Stephanie Cohen-Aloro of France....sometimes we forget that photography is supposed to be fun.

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.