2016 Photos of the Year

I'll just come right out and say it, 2016 was a pretty shitty year. Lots of really cool leaders and entertainers died, our country decided it wanted to halt what was a nice flow of forward thinking progress and economic gains and go backwards to a Mad-Men-esq era of old corporate white dudes who are mostly interested keeping each other wealthy beyond all belief(at the expense of the environment and the 99%). In some weird way though, I think it'll be a very prosperous 2017 for us news folk. If it's anything like the Bush years, which was the last time I called myself a working photojournalist, we'll be very busy. Bad economy, corruption, global conflicts, immigration/deportation, rights issues, will all be front and center these next few years like we've never seen. I really hope many media outlets and their journalists and editors, as a whole, can gain back some respectability after a rather pathetic election season where made-up, red meat scandals ruled our news cycles along with an orgasmic Orange crush on a certain candidate who helped manipulate and rile-up a large portion of our less educated, working class folks. He basically put out the bait and and caught whale. I hope to do my part by striving to show humanity in the people I photograph and by staying honest.
Keep up the fight everyone, be prosperous and have a great new year.

Tornado Chase

Spent a week driving through the midwest with a profeesional storm chaser looking to get sexy shots of these cars racing through storms. We started in Denver and headed East through Wyoming and across South Dakota and into Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska and ended in Illinois. We had several great storms where a few funnel clouds popped down for a quick hello and then dissipated. Never quite got a full touch down but that's what Mother Nature gave us. It's so fun looking at weather models and trying to predict exactly where the cold and warm air masses will collide. We'd wake up each morning with sunny, blue skies where you'd never thing a tornado warning would go into effect, and by about 5 pm all hell would break loose. It was a lot of driving around, looking for low lying clouds and seeing where they would bunch up. We'd then race towards that mass and then just sit util shit started to whirl and then race along with it until it would die down. It was fun seeing legions of other chasers out, zooming all around as the clouds were forming and wondering if they knew something we didn't. Its this perfect balance of technology and good old fashion looking up at the sky and trusting your intuition. I find there are lots of similarities between chasing news assignments and weather. Adrenaline, instinct, timing and heading into the action while everyone else is fleeing, and no fear, well, not too much fear.
I'm not quite ready to quit my day job but I could chase tornados and never get tired.