My studio mate Rob has started shooting 4x5 (finally) and I lurked around a few days ago when he was shooting. Excited to see his journey and the work that comes of it.

We've had Fin for about 4 months now and he's about 7 months old and it's possible I've never been as much in love than now. It's fully disgusting. Here are a couple of images from yesterday afternoon on the porch.

Cows in Florence, Alabama. Shot for a story for the New York Times.

I ended last year with a late December assignment to make a portrait of a whistleblower in (apparently) the largest fraud case in US history. His name is Jack Palmer and he started the ball rolling against his employer Infosys, a Indian outsourcing company, about an year and half ago. There's no quick nor simple way to explain the whole debacle (so I suggest you read the article), but its beginnings are in the company allegedly abusing visitor visas for employees coming in from India. Infosys can't fire him, so he technically still works there, but they give him ZERO connection to the company. None. He's stuck at home, climbing up the walls.

I spent the afternoon down in Montgomery creating some portraits so the Times could have them when relevant news about the trial broke. It took a while to run and when I went digging for an unrelated story I expected to run today, I happened to find that they finally ran a shot. A month ago. Oops!

They ran a tight head shot of him, but I really prefer a couple of other shots, so I'm posting those.

Here's the first paragraph of Julia Preston's NYT article:

It has been 17 months since Jack B. Palmer first made a quiet complaint through internal channels at Infosys, the giant Indian outsourcing company he works for, saying he suspected some managers were committing visa fraud. Since then, Mr. Palmer says, he has been harassed by superiors and co-workers, sidelined with no work assignment, shut out of the company’s computers, denied bonuses and hounded by death threats.

Read more here.

I'm excited to be able to post this! When I was in Africa at the end of last year making photos for Development in Gardening (DIG), I also stepped into my video pants* to help produce this video they just released. I was happy to hand over all the footage and images to Stephanie and Mike Kaplan and I'm so so so happy with the narrative they crafted and watching it just makes me want to go hang out with all these lovely people.

Here's the official blurb on the video:

Filmed in DIG project sites in Kenya and Uganda. This video shares how sustainable agriculture can transform individual lives and communities around the world.

*they were cargo shorts, but they totally count. Cargo shorts are essential to a lot of my life.

For more information on what DIG does and how you can help, check out their website at ReapLifeDIG.org.

So, we found a house. Long story short, we found a foreclosure here in Birmingham and Stephanie's dad (who is a contractor) snatched it up and now we just clean it up* a bit and we can buy it from him!

*This is a GIANT asterisk though. It was, as I said, a foreclosure, and BOY is it is some rough shape. If you can steal it from a house, it's been stolen from this place. It's got a few other thing we have to fix, but Steph's dad can totally handle it. So in a few months, I guess I'll post a blog saying we actually bought a place. For now, we just sort of bought a place by proxy.

Above is Stephanie taking a break from cleaning out one of the rooms of the detached apartment.

Outtake from March 17

Pretty weird.

Here's a really bad video of our bees flying like crazy this afternoon. Fully unedited, featuring wind noise, shaky cam, and awkward zooming!

To add to his arsenal of badassery, Winslow recently got a sweet beater Yamaha motorcycle.

We've been working hard on our bees this year. We may not be good at it yet, but we enjoy it. Slowly trying to put together a video project about these lovely little girls, but I'm not great at that either, so for now, here's a still from this weekend.

Cheers!

Stumbled across this old shot today. It's fun to revisit old work. I suggest it. This is from a mini working vacation with some photo friends last summer.

From today's lunch walkabout.

More digging around in the recent Africa trip shots yielded this dude. Peter. If I've not ranted on him before, I'm sure I will at some point. He's like 70 years old I think, but looks maybe 50.

Meant to post yesterday...I met Stephanie six years ago yesterday. Why she said hello to me when I was wearing cargo shorts and 80s socks, I'll never know, but I'm glad she did.

Also, look at that damn dog. That's one good looking wiener.

Nearby one of the AIDS outreach centers DIG has joined with in the Jinga area lives a dude who built a radio. Well, really it seems like the radio itself is a standard receiver, but the ANTENNA is just nuts. He can, allegedly, get channels from all sorts of African countries on this bad boy. Feels more like an art installation than a functional home device.

All I know is it's badass.

I'm going through the ole archive to put together an edit of my various exploits in Africa and I just love this one.

Mini DIG story:

This is Emma, one of my favorite kids from the orphanage where DIG has a project just outside of Jinga, Uganda. He stuck out in my memory the first time we went there and I was super pleased to see he was the same semi-spastic, loving boy I remembered. He danced half the day we went visited back in 2009 and he was first up the jackfruit tree this time, when we headed into the family's land. He's one of quite a few kids (from infants to late high schoolers) living with Paul and Rose at their home in a tiny town called Bwala. And I gotta say, I was blown away by the growth of these kiddos. I had conversations (that were probably out of my league) with a couple of the older kids (Collin and Maureen) that showed how much they had learned about growing food and creating a sustainable system for their future, and now doubt that interest and knowledge is spreading around to everybody they live with too.

I guess I love this shot because it seems to sum up the hope I associate with all those kids. Emma's precocious grin says a lot to me about the future ahead of him.

The New York Times ran a profile on Roy Moore this weekend which I shot last week.

Here's an additional shot they ran and a couple of outtakes I like.

The whole story is here.

The first day of spring for us here in Alabama was in the mid-80s which makes me sort of terrified about what summer has to offer. S'gonna be hot as crap. But I spent most of my day in an air-conditioned car and posting photos to Instagram*, and I'm gonna blather on about it right...Now.

*I love Instagram. It's almost unhealthy.

I got up ahead of sunrise, which is lately becoming too much of a habit, so I could get to ATL to meet up with Sarah Koch of DIG (Development in Gardening) and scamper over to the Dekalb Farmers market to stock up on a bunch of awesome whole foods to photograph as one of the final steps for their Nutrition Manual and their Gardening Manual they've been working on for a while. It's gonna be awesome, and by awesome I mean it's going to help them help others help others. That's a lot of helping. (The point of these manuals is to pictographically walk through stuff like diet / nutrition and how to make all that delicious food yourself in a garden)

I was greeted with the slowest ever merger on to I-75/I-85 I've even been a part of, despite it looking like a veritable wasteland.

Met up with Sarah at their new downtown office, which had a killer view. We immediately escaped to the Dekalb Farmers Market, which blew my mind. They had a no photography sign that I obeyed fully, if anyone asks.

And below is our take! Since we were only buying for a photo shoot, we were only buying something like 3 cents worth different things. Kinda felt bad about it. Oh well.

After we wrapped, I spent the day driving around in my oil-leaking car (soon to be fixed by the place that recently did work on the ole Subaru), meeting up with some friends for dinner, and talking myself out of buying an E-Pad.

The sun at horizon sandwiched my day.

But speaking of DIG, I was going to mention some more junk I'm planning on posting. I dropped in recently with Slaughter Group, who is responsible for me being connected with DIG in the first place, because they're working on what will undoubtedly become a killer photo-heavy print piece (which excites me). While I was there, we started talking about collecting stories that could serve as narratives throughout the piece and I found myself gushing about various groups or individuals. I didn't realize how jam-packed with awesomeness these DIG trips have been, but now that I've lived with it all for a while, the magnitude and depth of these experiences is sort of catching up with me. So I'm planning on making a few posts to talk about some of the people I've met and how their lives have been impacted by DIG.

Alright cool. I'll be back.

{ed note: Well crap. I've been mixing my days up. ALL THIS SHIT HAPPENED ON THE SECOND DAY OF SPRING! THIS BLOG POST IS RUINED!}

I meant to mention this a while back but it slipped my mind—My studio mate and friend Rob launched a new website that you should check out.

Happy International Women's Day!

In honor, here's a photo of one of my favorite women!

Also, this shot was featured on Self-Assignment.