For this post, lets go with another macro, this time an azalea blossom in the Ruby Mize Azalea Garden at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches.
If you've never been, the Mize Gardens is definitely worth the trip. While the azaleas, for the most part, are done for another year, the gardens offer an amazing opportunity for a brief commune with nature. True, this is a very sculptured garden, with a full-time staff who makes sure everything looks beautiful. And they do a good job of it, too.
But, once you enter the gardens, you can almost forget you're just a few yards from a busy street skirting the east side of a large college campus.
A little about the image: This is another example of my love of off-camera flash. This particular blossom was photographed using one strobe on a stand, out of frame on the left. Even though it appears to be shot at night, it was made during the full light of day. Selective exposure threw the background to black while letting the strobe work as the primary light source for the workings of the flower.
This type of photography lets me clear my mind, refocus my thoughts and get on with the day-to-day grind of photojournalism. A number of people comment, sometimes daily, on how glamorous and exciting being a photojournalist must be. And, sometimes, it is.
I've seen and done some amazing things, from riding a coal train into the largest mine in Wyoming's Powder River Basin to touring a uranium mine in the northwest Nebraska Panhandle. I've photographed presidents and actors, the famous and the infamous.
But the images that mean the most to me often are of the people down the street, doing what they do on a daily basis. Those are the folks that really make the world go around.
When I was working in Kansas, one of the ladies at the paper believed (rightly so) that everybody had a story. We worked on numerous assignments together with what you'd probably call "average" people, finding that one individual event or talent that made them unique.
One such, a story I did on my own, came from an average guy who came into my office to pay his newspaper bill. Turned out he was a paratrooper in World War II with one of the units which jumped into France on D-Day. Now, he builds elaborate doll houses and gives them to girls in his church and around the community.
It's that kind of thing and those types of people which keeps me loving the job I do. And it's what drives me to look beyond the surface, to explore and delve deeper into the stories and images in the world around me.
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