I’ve been shooting with SLRs for over twenty years, and I’ve been working as a pro photographer in some capacity or the next for the past decade. I’ve paid my dues: I strung for a local weekly paper making next to nothing shooting real estate art for classifieds and picking up overflow scraps of assignments the staff shooter couldn’t cover. While I was working at that paper, I was also going back to school, taking graphic design and Photoshop classes at the local community college, while also waiting tables and cooking in a restaurant four or five nights a week. It was tough, but I saw the early dawn lights of the coming digital imaging revolution and knew this was what I wanted to do much more than a career in academia or in a museum somewhere–my intents when I began college.I spun the gig stringing for the local 5-town weekly into a fulltime gig as a Photo Technician for the daily dual-county-coverage Asbury Park Press. 40 hours a week, I color corrected photos from the staff shooters and the AP wire. There’s nothing creative about being a PTech–you’ve just got to pin the colors in the photos for CMYK laydown. But while this position was lacking in personal creative output, it was rich with amazing creative input. See, I wasn’t just trying to nail the sky and skintones to CMYK numbers, I was studying each and every photo to see what worked and didn’t work. Chief Photographer Peter Ackerman’s photos played a major role in the next wave of development of my photographic eye. I was on the desk when the Devils won the Stanley Cup in 2000 and we were hanging on every shot to come in, promising the printers that the pages would be moved “soon”. I moved amazing shots from the Sydney Olympics, and thousands upon thousands of day-to-day reportage shots. But the shooting itch was still there–and I pushed for a chance to get back to shooting when an opening came up in the New Pubs division. And for almost three years, I was a Staff Photographer for the Press. Mostly small moments, a few big events, tons of scholastic sports, fun features, boring business stories and more. I swam with dolphins and played with baby tiger cubs at Six Flags Great Adventure, got dropped off a 6 story training building by Jersey City Fire Department cadets to get an angle, even shot the first-ever NY/NJ Hitmen home game for the XFL, if anyone remembers that sports franchise failure.The morning of September 11th, 2001, I was getting ready for work, watching the Weather Channel, when it was announced that a plane struck the World Trade Center. I knew instantly this wasn’t a freak accident. I shook a little, felt I was going to be sick for a few minutes, then braced myself and drove the 10 minutes to the newsroom–just knowing it would be easier to just show up and se what was happening than trying to call anyone on that momentous morning. I walked into the newsroom and was immediately told to head to the Highlands Ferryport. Following smoke on the horizon the whole way, I first cried that morning as I crossed the Route 36 Bridge between Sea Bright and the Highlands and got my first true glimpse of what should have been the standard view of the NYC skyline across Raritan Bay. For the next several hours, I shot at the Ferryport making images of evacuees, local rescue squad workers in a dockside triage and just loads of different angles of the entire scene playing out before me as best I could manage. I shot a photo a nun with binoculars surveying the burning rubble across the bay from atop the hill by the Twin Lights. I remember some faces and some moments more than others. A lot of it is still a blur to this day. It was rough. Later that afternoon, back at a photo workstation, I remember my lips feeling incredibly sunburnt. The enormity of the events of that morning didn’t truly sink in until much later. All I know is I was a news photographer, and I went unblinkingly to my on-the-fly assignment. I stayed at the Press for a few more years as a staffer. I managed to cajole some editors into letting me polish my rusty writing skills by volunteering to write the copy for several photo essays I wanted to produce. You see, way back when, I always planned on having photography act as a value-add or equal partner to my writing–but the photography gigs took off much quicker than the writing. During this time, I became very active in an online photo group that splintered off of the first iteration of the PopPhoto forum . As a moderator/admin of the long-lost Phototalk.net, I became friendly with the ME of Pop, Mason Resnick, who was also running their online boards way back when. We had a lot of crossover membership and would often compare notes about some of the more “colorful” characters we’d encounter online. All the while, I was honing my writing skills in the forums and blogs of Phototalk. I pitched a couple of story ideas to Mason, and some made it past the outright rejection phase, but none ever saw the light of day.About the same time, I left the relative safety of the Press and headed full-on into the world of freelance photography. I shot for just about any and every newspaper that would hire me for an assignment–The Asbury Park Press, The Home News Tribune, Courier-News, Daily Record, Ithaca Journal, Star-Ledger, LI Newsday and even the New York Times. I shot PR events for Fortune 500 companies. I did a lot of rewarding, if challenging, assignments for the local ARC, and pretty much anything and everything I could get paid a decent rate for–except weddings. That’s a story for another day.That is until just over three years when Mason Resnick left Pop and came onboard as the Editor of what is now called the Adorama Learning Center and Newsdesk. Back then it was Adorama Academy.
