Friday night lights, just for fun

All the prep football in Chattanooga was rained out on a Friday night (in November), so I had a chance to run back onto the field when I was there on Saturday visiting. This is the first high school football I had photographed in a year. Didn't turn out too badly, after all.
One of the coaches for the home team did ask me if I was in high school during half-time, though. Yikes.

Dayly

The first image was two brave students doing pilates on the library lawn as their friends and the occasional lawn mower passed by. The second is the line at 8 p.m. - 12 hours before Jay-Z tickets went on sale at the student center. The second is a student collecting leaf samples on the campus, which is a national arboretum. The last two are the installation of the new track on the edge of campus. Two of the men came from Italy with the track, and the other two are tow-headed farm boys from Wisconsin.

Just outside the door

Strange Fruit

Watermelon Bust

Water ballon capture the flag

Seniorfest

Just outside the student center, life seems to always be happening. Some days I feel guilty for constantly covering things so close to home. Alas, how can you ignore flying people, watermelons and water balloons?

Not your average class

Word got out the ROTC was rappelling off the library. No student photographers available. So the poor advisor had to climb on top of the building and tie herself in before leaning over the edge. Bummer.

Ground-breaking, not earth-shattering

It's hard to make successful images of a non-event like this. A theoretical ground-breaking hardly lends itself to great pictures. However, I tried diligently not to get bored. 

Downpour

I never thought I would miss weather features. After leaving a paper that sent us out for weather with an urgency as though city hall were burning, I thought my days of standing in the pouring rain were over. Now I can't wait to get out of the office and into the puddles. It's been raining for over a week now in Tennessee. 

Finding my way

It's been a whirlwind since I arrived at Vanderbilt. I have felt rather bogged down by the busy work. But every so often I come up for air and wander around campus. I still get lost daily, so here's what I've been stumbling into on the way.

Final pass

This was my last assignment for the Chattanooga Times Free Press. A Georgia high school football practice. It lasted 30 minutes between severe thunder storms - just long enough for a rainbow to appear over the mountain ridge. Not a bad way to say goodbye.

Got it!

In one of my final days at the paper, I was overwhelmed with assignments and incredibly short on time. I pulled into this softball game 5 minutes after it should have ended. Overall, it may have been the best prep sports assignment I've shot this fall. For the amount of time I had on the field to shoot, I turned out a surprising number of usable images. Woo-hoo!

Today's news

This was an emergency feature on a rainy day. A group of Russian teenagers visiting Chattanooga for the day, down from Cleveland, Tenn. This certainly illustrates the varied uses of the daily newspaper.

Wamp for Governor

Congressman Zach Wamp, representing Chattanooga, is one of Tennessee's next gubernatorial candidates. His Labor Day picnic and rally dissolved into a lightening storm, which sent supporters running in every direction. He's probably hoping it isn't an omen.

Snip

Why is it first haircuts are so painful?

Laboring

This couple was cooking about 30 steaks, but cooking them a day ahead of time. They had big plans for resting all day Monday, and eating with friends and family.

Too early for nonsense

Holding a town hall meeting at 7:30 a.m. on a Wednesday just seems like you're trying to make yourself inaccessible. If you charge people to come on top of that, it just seems like weeding out the opposition. For some reason, health reform has brought some crazy people out into the limelight. This woman kept talking about the Communist Ka-czars (pronounced somewhat like "Ka-Zam"). Her history was a little rusty, but she continued to use the word emphatically.

Critial care counseling

This doctor spends his life in the ICU, treating patients hooked to multiple machines - most with at least two organ systems failing. He is a strong proponent of counseling for families, preparing for end of life decisions that are difficult to discuss when one is faced with them suddenly.

Intensity

This week has been a struggle in the world of feature hunting. This park ranger had a handful of marginally-interested tourists surrounding him in our local Civil War battlefield national park. He was so into the telling of his story, that he didn't so much as blink when I walked up and started firing away.
The first comment in the newsroom was that he appeared as though he were about to wrestle a bear.

Unidentifiable

This situation was a challenge. A school that failed to meet its adequate yearly progress goals let us in to take pictures, but you really don't want to put a child's face next to the headline labelled 'failure.' So, this was my library find, without faces.

Everyday features

These are a few photos from around town in the last few days.


The rain photos are a little artsy for newspaper fare, but I decided I was going to push the limits a bit.

Sunday was a day without much direction. Among my finds were two sisters playing in Chickamauga Lake above a TVA dam. The latter photo is a set of neighbors in an historic neighborhood. The 10-year-old girl and her two sisters watch the neighbors house and pets when she and her husband are away. And the woman watches the three sisters when their mother is working a night shift as a nurse at a local hospital. They were standing at the picket fence talking about new neighbors down the street.

You have to trust your barber to fall asleep when he has a blade pressed against your skull. The snoozer has been coming to the Live and Let Live Barber Shop and Laundromat for over 22 years.