Doc Diaries: Covering the 2019 Stanford Invitational (part 1)

One thing I love about photography is that beauty can emerge from the harshest conditions. I shot the two-day Stanford Invitational track meet this past weekend, and to be honest, I felt like I was hanging on for dear life. But even in depths of that struggle, I still managed to put together some of my best work.

This is a story in two parts. This first part will talk about the logistical considerations and decisions that helped me to survive the weekend. The second part will go into the aesthetic decisions that helped me to rise above the struggle.

There's a saying that the goal of an endurance race is to survive long enough that you can be there for the moments of the race that really matter. Something similar is true about endurance photography. You have to put yourself in the position to do great work, and then you have to actually make those pictures when the time comes.

Looking back and looking forward

Time flies… It's hard for me to believe but it's been about 11 years since I started this blog. A lot has changed, and yet, the goal has always remained the same: to share the stories I see in the world with people who want to hear those stories.

I just announced the start of a new project, that will hopefully build on a lot of the work that I've put into the blog. The blog will continue, make no mistake. But this new project should help me to bring new life to the stories that I wrote years ago, and also to pull together thematic threads that have sometimes spanned many of those years.

Thanks for joining me on this journey so far, and I'm excited about what the future may hold. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, comments — whatever it might be — I'd love to hear them.