Week Two––#VirginiaSwift

Week two of my spring internship has come to an end.

This week brought many new challenges and experiences. I saw some friends, met some of my heroes, mailed over forty postcards and photographed several truly resilient and interesting humans. It's nice to be able to focus on my photography again. After having been so immersed with the Slab City documentary (trailer coming soon), it is a relief to be thrown back into photography. However, I'm struggling to be content with anything I photographed this week. I have this quixotic view of what my images should look like and when it is not achieved, it can be frustrating. Thankfully, working for a newspaper means that there are new assignments (thus new opportunities to improve) everyday.

This is Trevor Macfadden. He works at the coffee shop I go to everyday. We did a feature on 25 30 Espresso (the shop) as a part of Fredericksburg's annual Restaurant Week.

This is Evan, a five-year-old with autism. Evan's older brother, Andrew also has autism and his mother just had another child. Evan's house was recently infested with bed bugs and his mother had to get rid of all of the furniture and toys while taking care of a newborn. Evan now owns lots of toy weapons.

This is LeAnn, 55, she lost over 85 pounds in the last two years.

Cleo Coleman spoke at the 9th annual MLK birthday celebration in Fredericksburg. Coleman knew "The Warrior", she says she used to cook for him in Philadelphia.

These little girls eating cupcakes and ice cream at a birthday party for a girl with a rare disease that causes her to have blood transfusions every three weeks (the back of the girl's head can be seen in the right hand corner).

Annnd my first ever self portrait. I needed to give a headshot to some people for an announcement and I didn't have one and my roommate was busy so.... this is my best attempt. I used a tripod to hold the camera (obviously) and then used a light stand with a towel on it to pull focus for where my eyes would be. I think it works well enough, I've never pretended to be a  portrait photographer, after all. 

Anyhoo. Here's to this week, and hoping that the next one is even better.

Wedding Dresses and Homeless Shelters––Week One of #VirginiaSwift

In the last month change has been rapid. I graduated from college (mostly), moved out of my Lary Potter Under the Stairs room in Ventura to an actual apartment in Fredericksburg, drove across the country, left the people I love most in the world, ate some really good Christmas cookies and got some really encouraging news about things to come in the future.

After spending New Years in Vermont, I moved to Virginia. I live above an Irish Pub & Restaurant with another photographer, Adrian Elliott (his work is incredible, checkout it out HERE ). I've found it really comforting to be back in a (relatively) small town. Fredericksburg has just under 30,000 people in it, over four times as many people as the town I grew up in... but small by California standards.

I began my internship with the Free Lance-Star  on Monday. I shot a few assignments this week and was rather frustrated with the images I was making until last night when I photographed a wedding dress fashion show. I'm really looking forward to the next few months here, I think there is a lot of room for me to grow as a photojournalist and I'm really excited to be working with such a talented staff!

Anyhoo, here are some pictures I took this week.

Brittany

Brittany's shoe

Snacks before the runway

Katelyn Pankoke of Project Runway was the dress designer

This dress costs $15,000 because it is sewn with gold thread

Sandy sleeps at the homeless shelter in Fredericksburg

Meet Gene

Gene is 18 years-old and homeless

This is Chance, he also stays at the shelter sometimes

Dog show's are strange

Crossfit is also strange

One of these days I'm going to learn how to take a really good sport photo... or just a good sports photo, I would settle for that

Beach Goth Party Photos & Reflection

GALLERY

     When I was 19, my favorite musician was Frank Turner & The Sleeping Souls. I was going to college in Iowa and when my friend, Connor Mulhern, asked me if I wanted to photograph a Frank Turner show for dyingscene.com, I was very enthusiastic about the opportunity. I met up with Connor in Milwaukee, WI, and we interviewed and took pictures of Frank and the opening act, Andrew Jackson Jihad (AJJ).
     I photographed to the best of my abilities for someone who didn't know what an aperture was. Although I was dissatisfied with the images I took, I became enamored with the experience. This show was the inciting incident for what would soon become an obsession with photography. An obsession that would eventually take me across the country to Ventura, California to study photojournalism.
     I think it is significant that I photographed AJJ exactly three years from when these images were taken. I took the first ones at a very formative time in my life. Now, as I prepare to graduate in December, it feels like an important benchmark. Today, I am just as unhappy with the images as I was in 2011. My hope is that in three years I can photograph AJJ again and feel just as dissatisfied. If there is one thing I've learned during these last few years, it is that dissatisfaction breeds growth and powers improvement. LINK TO THE GALLERY 

This is a dancer for Alice Glass

Here are some photos I took from the show in 2011:

 Andrew Jackson Jihad

Connor, Mitch, Frank and I after the interview

Downtown Milwaukee

When I'm nervous I take pictures.

I realized that I haven't blogged since the end of Reno.

Since then, I've been unable to shoot as often as I would like and certainly not as much as I did over the summer. My main focus has been put towards shooting a documentary with Sarah Bourscheid and Chris Martinez out near the Salton Sea in Slab City.  The documentary is about a woman named Moria and her husband, Ben Morofsky... I won't say anymore now, but I'm very excited about it!

Anyhoo. Coming home is weird. No matter how long you're gone for it always seems to be strange. In these few days that I've spent here before I go to the Eddie Adams Workshop, I have been very nervous. I've found that the best way for me to deal with any emotion is just to photograph... so this is what I've been trying to do a lot of. Some of the things I've been posting are on my INSTAGRAM account, but here are the rest!

Sleepy Sarah after spending a very chilly night in the car in Bombay Beach

Reflection of a man reading a book

Adam Apple Orchard

Marcell and his tractor in Williston, Vt

So many apples

Polly Dakin. 

Apples

Autumn

Leaves

Found a lizard

Honky Tonk Tuesday

Honky Tonk Tuesday

My Aunt's birthday

And then I ran into Bernie Sanders... 

And then the sky was purple–– Last week in pictures.

Sports forever. Last week almost all of my assignments were sports related. Even the nutrition lab I went to was full of sports supplements. I have one week left as an intern at the Reno Gazette Journal and I still haven't had an assignment I didn't like. However, I will forever struggle with sports and portraits. I know I just need more practice but I hope it doesn't take me too long to figure out this whole sports action and posing people business. On Saturday I went back to the office to edit photos I took of the Tour de Nez bike race and I stepped outside to grab something from my car and there was a rainbow and the sky had turned purple and it was the most incredible light. I ran back inside and told my sports editor that I was sorry but I had to go make some images. She just laughed and told me to go on. I'm happy that my pictures from the crazy sky aren't as beautiful as the actual event of seeing it was... something are made better by memory. Anyway, here are some attempts I made at not being boring. Take a look.

Now Foods plant in Sparks gave tours to their western customers. 

Mister batter A.J. Pollock. The ball missed him and he got a good hit in on the next pitch.

Aces pitcher Lucas Harrell

 August Brautigam won the San Francisco Marathon. He is a Reno resident BUT is originally from Vermont! In fact, I found out that I've raced against his brother in Nordic skiing back in high school aaaand his brother went to college in my hometown, Middlebury. The world is very small. 

Will Lachenauer was paralyzed from the chest down in a motocross accident in 2008 but he is now on the US para-cycling team. He won the handcycling race on the Tour de Nez in downtown Reno.

Sports. 

Trying to take shelter from the rain in some tree branches. 

Michael Jasinski from Rose Valley.

More rain and bicycles.

At the end of the day it was nice to see that some people were having fun. 

From my car window on Second Street.

Cal Neva anyone?

Believe it or not, this is barely edited. I burned the sky a little and dodged the building. THE SKY WAS SO CRAZY. 

Side note, I can't stop listening to old blues music: 

The people of Hot August Nights.

This week all I photographed was cars and golf... so basically I turned into a 60 year old man. Instead of posting photos that I submitted for the paper, I wanted to highlight the people of Hot August Nights. Sorry, no golf photos. I think that this event really brought out the true, authentic people of Reno. I've always been one to try to interact with my subjects but this week I made a grand attempt to remain invisible and unknown to those I was photographing. I went up to them afterwards to get their name so they knew eventually but it was a tactic I just wanted to try out.

Hot August Nights used to be a weekend riddled with crime. One year there was a riot, since then the police have had a really strong presence at the event. Despite their attempts, I've been told that this event brings in massive amounts of illegal prostitution and drug use. To begin this, meet Lenny, Tammy and Coco. Lenny and Tammy have been married 30 years and in Reno for almost the same amount of time.

Goodbye Hot August Nights.