Week in Review

Here are a couple new shots from the past week. I have been pouring all of my energy into getting my portfolio ready for the Eddie Adams Workshop coming up next week. I can not wait. It promises to be pretty intense. More to come...

Food for Thought

"The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget."

- John Peter Berger, an art critic, novelist, painter, and author.

A Week's Worth

Coming off my football portraits last week, I have been pushing onward with the start of fall sports. It is nice to be busy again here at the paper. I'm looking forward to what comes next. I found out that I have been featured on the blog of a new up and coming fly fishing magazine called The Flyfish Journal. You can find the link here. The magazine is set to be on news stands throughout the states at the end of September and I will have numerous fly fishing photographs from my travels in South America expedition featured in their inaugural issue. Feel free to let them know what you think of my work. Best, -M

The Return of Prep Football and the Portrait Machine

Well after a long summer, football season has finally arrived. Things are starting to get busy around the paper with the dawn of the new school year. Prep sports are getting underway and my newspaper, like so many others, does an annual prep football preview section to ring in the new season. I was assigned to shoot portraits of the new guys filling in the empty positions on varsity. I have been shooting nothing but portraits all week. Actually a fun change of pace for me. The last two are from another story about die-hard pro football fans. Getting ready for some football. Go Bears!

I have always been a huge live music fan. As a high school student growing up in Chicago, there wasn't a summer weekend when I wasn't seeing a band in the city. Still to this day, I am consistantly watching my radar of when the next good band comes to town in anticipation of seeing them. So when our Daily Republic Tailwind editor Nick DeCicco approached me about trying to get press passes to this year's Outside Lands Music Festival, I was all about it. Getting them wasn't a guarantee, but it was worth a shot.

About two weeks before the show, we got the word that we had been approved and we started making our plans for the three day show. I have shot a couple big concerts before but nothing of this magnitude. So when I arrived after navigating the BART system, it took me a while to take it all in. The festival consisted of five music stages scattered throughout Golden Gate Park in downtown San Francisco. I wanted to show a variety of the acts that would be performing so Nick and I roughly planned out which acts we wanted to see and have me photograph. The festival organizers were very helpful towards the press, extending complementry food and beer but very firm in their rules when it came to shooting the musicians. Every band was accessible to shoot during their performance but the photographers would only have access to the front photo pit (infront of the audience front row seating) for the first three songs of a set. This was awesome and at the same time could be frustrating. Because of the very short amount of time, I had to join the scrum of photographers shooting frantically and try to get as many usable images as possible. Your constantly shooting, moving around, dodging other shooters and fighting for a good shooting angle. It was chaos but a hell of a lot of fun to be apart of. There is something to be said of experiencing a concert inches from the band members performing on stage. The festival was a gathering for celebration and it provided an endless supply of enthusiastic people and good photo opportunities. It was an experience I won't soon forget. -Mike

Check out more photos at our new media gallery at http://www.photo.dailyrepublic.net/?p=386