Today was an early one, although I got all my gear ready and camera batteries charged last night, I was up before the sun to get to the Aspen Surgery Center in Simi Valley for a 7:30 AM surgery.  The shoot was to illustrate National Job Shadow Day and particularly fun for me because the reporter Michele Willer-Allred and I were covering a triple procedure:  an arthroscopic shoulder and rotator cuff repair and a Mumford procedure all on the same man, Douglas Mansfield of Simi Valley. 

Two Westlake High School kids, Brett Kaplan and Ryan Davis were shadowing Dr. Gregg P. Hartman, an orthopedic surgeon for a full day. Hartman was informative and personable, definitely helpful to Kaplan and Davis to getting a rare indepth perspective at what they might be one day should they pursue their aspirations.

 

It's no easy task getting access to anything medical because of the HIPPA laws but between Anglea Gonzales' public relations, team work on the part of the Star, the medical staff's OK, and the willingness of  patient  Douglas Mansfield,  we were able to report the students' experiences during the operation.

Technically it was odd because the flourescent lights in the operating room weren't balanced.  One in the corner where Kaplan and Davis hunkered down for the better part of the procedure would shoot out red light waves periodically.  I couldn't use my off camera strobe to override it because of the interference of radio waves in the hospital.  Most of the frames were balanced OK, but a few that could have been keepers were junk.

I was recording audio for a slide show but got the idea to do an i-Phone video.  Probably not my best thought because there wasn't enough time to caption the stills, build a slide show with audio and edit the video before deadline.  Ray Meese took on the video editing, very nice of him.  I hope to get my Final-Cut skills up to something close to his speed.  There's so much to do now with this metamorphosis of print news into a multi-media world! 


  

Photo by Chuck Kirman / Star staff January 23, 2010 Simi Valley:  Jered Weaver of the Los Angeles Angels and Simi Valley High School alumni pitched one inning and struck out the side in the Simi Valley High School baseball alumni game January 23, 2010. It was great that he pitched and with such ease and great control.

"I'm going though a break-up", is what Alexandro Guerrero told me when I saw him at the bus and train station in Camarillo after the rain had stopped. I was waiting for some kind of rain art anticipating the 4:22 train but the train had come and gone, the rain had run its course, and I was on my dinner break. Guerrero was too unusual not to photograph.

Boys were skate-boarding off the cement benches at the station and there, separate from them, sat this tattooed, pierced, hungry looking young man with a few grocery bags full of clothes using one finger from each hand to run the keys on his cell phone.  I walked behind him and saw two piercings spanning thin metal bars horizontally over two vertibrae in his neck.  His earlobes had gigantic rings spreading the skin so far open I could see through them. I was aching to photograph him; he was a visual gift from the photo gods to me.

Guerrero wasn't weather art material, but he sure was potent for a portrait. He expressed not wanting to be photographed except for from the back. I got a few frames, thanked him and left. 

I stopped to see if he would be alright before I drove off, he was waiting on the person who he had just broken up with and my gut said Guerrero wasn't going to get that ride.  He said it would be OK after all if I wanted to photograph him, but the candid moment had dissolved. I got a portrait of him waiting on the sunny side of the station and liked a frame that had the silhouette of one of the boys skating in the background.  It symbolized loneliness to me.    

Last week was laden with rain and the newspaper's need to illustrate it.  I sought something different without umbrellas, something that would be unique to the body of work we had created and published so far.  The east county was my focus and I returned to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum even though I had been there earlier in the week. I wanted something with more punch than what I was able to deliver on the prior visit (an image of two girls walking down a wet path during a break in the rain).  I went to the Air Force One hangar trying to compose a frame around the grid of windows facing northeast and waited for the moment to happen. A lot of times a photo like that just doesn't present itself, there's composition but no moment, but once in a while it does. 

Jered Weaver of the Los Angeles Angels and Simi Valley High School alumni pitched one inning and struck out the side in the Simi Valley High School baseball alumni game January 23, 2010.
I was amazed he pitched in the game and more amazed how easily he handled the batters and with such ease.

This afternoon Zeke Barlow and I rode along on a Ventura County Sheriff's Dept. helicopter assessing storm damage around the county.  It was the first time I had to shoot without the taken the door off the helicopter. It is much better to shoot that way. They put a harness on you and you can swivel all around with no obstructions.  In such harsh weather both my camera gear and the company's would have been ruined pretty fast. Waterways throughout the county swelled looking precarious for a few encampments along the Ventura River, but overall not too bad.

I got a kick out of the crew's reaction when requested by their department to fly to a tornado in Ventura right by the Oxnard line, "You want a helicopter to fly into a tornado?" It had passed by that time anyway. A big swathe of plastic had been blown off tented crops, trees had fallen in a nearby neighborhood and one house had a tree land squarely on top of it.

Fast forward to dusk: The photo editor, Ray Meese, had narrowed down my edit and just as the last caption was going on my final image, the police scanner sounded off with the report of swift water rescue at St. Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula. It turned out to be no false alarm.  Lightning outlined the mountains on the road leading up to the college and tire marks parted marble sized hail.  The rain was so heavy some motorists had pulled to the side of the road.

It could have been the same helicopter that I was in earlier, but one from the Ventura County Sheriff's Dept. hovered over a creek at the college attempting to illuminate the rescue of five students. 

Sometimes access to precarious situations like this is tough but the V.C.F.D. and their swift water rescue team were fantastic guiding me right to where I wanted to be, elbow to elbow with the rescuers at the water's edge. I would have preferred to come back with a shot of them helping the students across the chest-deep water, but the timing wasn't there and the camera exposures varied drastically as the helicopter passed over (I always shoot on manual).  All five students were out by the time I got to the perfect vantage point. 

Anna Bakalis was able to get an interview with one of the students, John Haggard, while the other four kind of slipped back into the dark returning to their dorm.  Rescue workers, students and news personnel were all unharmed.

Gary and Karen Morandi under an umbrella in the Las Posas Plaza parking lot on this rainy day January 20, 2010. It was nice to have been able to make this image from a dry location.

 Bevo, the Texas Longhorn mascot and icon was at the Hummingbird Ranch, January 6, 2009, after traveling from Texas to be at the BCS college football championship game at the Rose Bowl. I was amazed by the 73 1/2" span between the tips of his horns.
                               

Welcome to my first-ever blog! I'm starting my tenth year on staff here at the Ventura County Star and love my job as a photojournalist. What could be better than doing what you love and believe in for a living?  I hope to use this space as a look into the photographic side of story telling, provide a solid look at my experiences on the job and convey the critical value of photography and newspapers in the world.  I invite you to post feedback. Here we go....

This interesting angle of the Carnegie Art Museum, formerly known as the Oxnard Public Library and the Carnegie Cultural Arts Center, came about while making photos for another story during an assignment in Oxnard. It worked great when this person rode a power chair into the scene. Everybody else that came through was too tall and in the shade, I was about to move on when she casually rode by. I was born and raised in Oxnard and still find surprises when people, sunlight and reflections play together to let me see and share something new and different with others.