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Category : Photo

Mass Incarceration

As a staff photojournalist at a newspaper, you get used to covering the same things year after year. It is our mission to do our best to find something unique. I work on Sundays which means I cover all of the church services. It is par for the course around here to go to a couple services on Easter. Just like at any other assignment, I try to look for moments and light to make a different picture. Here are a frames […]

Austin Ramos Jr. vigil

A winter full of spot news

In my experience, the cold months are usually slow when it comes to spot news. Sure, you have accidents due to snow and ice, as well as a house fire or two. But overall, spot news is usually down. That has not been my experience during the last four months or so. I can’t count how many times I’ve been called out of bed in the morning or told to leave an assignment to get to breaking news these last […]

Palace Shoe Repair

Palace Shoe Repair

From time to time, everything seems to line up on an assignment. The light. The scene. The people. It happened recently when I was at Palace Shoe Repair. The family business has been a staple of downtown Rockford for about 90 years. The light was perfect. The vintage hand tools and machines had so much personality. I knew I was going to be happy spending some time there. I only could stay for about 30 minutes when I went to shoot […]

2014 Contests

I never know what to expect during contest season. I always spend too much time agonizing over which photos to enter. While waiting for the results, I convince myself that everything I shot the previous year was awful. I would be humbled to come away with nothing more then knowing that my images were in competition with some of the best in the business. This year, I had a better showing than I could have imagined. The first results to come in were […]

Funnel cloud over Perryville Road

Photographing a funnel cloud

I work hard to provide real-time images from the field during spot news. Severe weather is not an exception. Going into Thursday, April 9, we knew Rockford was in an area that was expecting active weather. I prepared my car and planned on staying out all day. Let me back up a bit. While I’m no meteorologist, I know more about weather than the average Joe. I’ve taken multiple storm spotter training courses with the National Weather Service. I have […]