Moore, Alabama

As a working photojournalist, I don’t spend much time posting images that I actually got paid to take. Partially, that is because I worry that most of my assignments would bore you all, and partially it is because this is my escape, my excuse to shoot for fun. When I started this section of the site, I had reached a point where I was analyzing every image for its potential to earn money. If it wasn’t going to garner a paycheck or a byline, I didn’t shoot it. It took the joy out of photography, turned the pleasure into just another job. This site changed that, renewed my love for this profession at a time when picking up my camera was the last thing I wanted to do.

Every photographer has a secret obsession with something, and one of mine is photographing cats like this one found Sunday in Moore’s Bridge. My other obsession is photographing the train trestle near my apartment (see this, this, this, and this). There is no mystery to my love for cats, after all, I share my life with seven furry ones, but the trestle holds its own mystique. When I have been away, it is the sight that says home to me, the sight that makes me feel like everything is going to be okay, and when I am sad it speaks to my soul in a way that nothing else can. I spend so much time documenting other people’s lives that it is nice sometimes to record those images that are special to me, the trivial things that make my life worth living.

Over the past week, I have completed 11 jobs for four clients: a furniture store ad, a cocktail party, gymnastics, a charity event, a standalone feature, county commissioner/sheriff/probate judge mug shots in Lamar, Fayette, and Pickens counties, theater rehearsals, high school band practice, and a college lecture on the Civil Rights movement. Tomorrow (today by the time you all read this), I will be in Demopolis, Ala. shooting another historic house for my hometown paper, The Mobile Register. I am happy to be busy. It keeps my mind occupied and pays the bills. Things could be worse.

Music of the day: Quasimodo by Lifehouse