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The story was about the rise of social clubs in Baltimore and other big cities, but my focus was on the Engineering Society of Baltimore. The club was started by the city’s railroad engineers in the Garrett-Jacobs Mansion. Baltimore is the birthplace of the American railroad, and so these engineers were some of the city’s elites. They built out a beautiful space over the years with tapestried walls and wood detailing imported from Europe. It feels like stepping into a totally different world from the mansion’s block in Mt. Vernon.

The Engineering Society is also opening up their space to members of the Johns Hopkins Club so I photographed their membership manager Britta Byrd-Hall. This was the kind of assignment where the space did a lot of the heavy lifting. My main goal was just to light it well and show off the quality and elegance of the mansion.

In other highlights, summer is almost over. I’m over the heat, and I’m over slow work weeks. I appreciate slowing down, but as a freelancer I don’t always know when my next gig is coming and having things slow down feels more stressful than having a packed schedule right now. I also went to Chincoteague Island last weekend with my partner! It’s a nature preserve on the very tip of the Delmarva Peninsula that’s famous for its wild ponies. We also got to see some dolphins swimming in the channel and just generally enjoyed a weekend away before our schedules start filling up again.

This Summer I’ve been working on a personal project at the Farm Alliance of Baltimore’s Black Butterfly Teaching Farm. I’ve been getting out as often as I can to photograph there which has frankly been less than I would have liked. One reason for that is scheduling, but the main reason is my own self-doubt and anxieties scaring me away from the work.

One of the things that inspired this project was reading about the approach to work that Alex Webb and his partner Rebecca Norris Webb write about in “Street Photography and the Poetic Image.” What I remember is that they don’t approach a project with the story set in stone before they have even taken a single photo. They just go and start photographing and follow what feels right about the story and the subject. They take weeks, if not months, between taking a photograph and actually editing it or putting it into a sequence. In a way, they’re letting the project tell its own story through their perspective and style rather than imposing a shape or form onto it.

This felt so different from a lot of what I was taught when I was studying photojournalism. It was drilled into me that I needed to know as much as possible about the things in my photos. As the old journalism adage goes “get the name of the dog.” Have all the details, know all the names, and know what your story is so you can tell it completely. This approach makes sense when you’re working on a deadline, trying to communicate something specific to a broad audience, and accountable to the people featured in your story. I wanted to break out of that storytelling method to help myself grow as a creative and photographer and learn to trust my instincts more. Surprise — it’s been hard.

This last week I felt a lot of guilt for not making it to the farm more. I’ve only made six visits total since April. But I also felt like I needed to define what I was doing before I could really move forward. I was letting all of my doubts about the photos I had taken so far get to me because they weren’t lining up with my expectations of the project. I was doing the exact opposite of what I had set out to do.

I still don’t know what this project is, but the main thing that I accomplished was deciding what the project wasn’t. Initially I thought it would be about the community around the farm and the way they interact with this greenspace growing in their backyards. That hasn’t panned out the way I expected because the farm put up a fence for very understandable security concerns, and scheduling problems that have kept me from most of the instructional classes and the farm’s community day. Also, I just don’t think that angle is honest. Yes, the farm is impacting the neighborhood around it, and in the future I think that impact will grow. Their impact just also goes a lot further. It feeds communities and restaurants throughout the city.

So, my next thought was I should document that impact. Follow the food from farm to table. But then I felt myself falling into old habits of making a story that’s just a process. A series of steps instead of a narrative or emotional arc.

So, if I know that this story isn’t about the community and it’s not about the process of regenerative farming, what is it? I’m still not entirely sure, but I like the photos I’ve been making. They don’t feel like a lot of my other work. I’ve been drawn to making things that are more mysterious, strange, textural, contrasty. Most importantly they feel like something honest about the place. They feel close to my experience on the farm, and the experience of the people that work there. A little harsh, but cared for by hand and given the time to grown and ripen into something valuable.

June was a busy month for me. So much so that I missed the last edition of this newsletter, and found myself without any plans on what to say this time around. So, I decided that I should just share some of my recent work and favorite gigs from the last month.

One of my latest stories for the Baltimore Sun was a panel on journalism, democracy, and finding the truth. It wasn’t the most visually interesting event. Most panels aren’t. It was nice when some natural light hit the crowd though.

These are two separate stories for the Baltimore Business Journal. The first was a group of realtors that were given a portfolio of homes to sell after the owner’s passing. He apparently owned about 50 properties that were all to be sold after his death and the funds donated to McDaniel College. You can find the full story here.

The second is a portrait of Baltimore County business owners and why they stay in the county. This is Michael Watriss of Great Feathers Fly Fishing. He was great to hang out with for a while and reminded me a good bit of my dad. I grabbed this photo while he was chatting with a regular and just needed to test my lights, but it turned out to be my favorite because I caught him acting naturally.

I had a few clients for headshots this month. I always found these intimidating because they felt so simple and quick. After doing a few though I feel like I’ve really hit my stride and know that doing them quickly is only because I’m prepared and well practiced with this type of photography. Anyways, if you or your company want some new headshots give me a call.

These photos are all from the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp which recently opened a new location here in Maryland. They’re original location is in Connecicut, but recently opened a new space on the eastern shore. The camp is only for children with serious illnesses and right now has focused on small family weekends while they continue to build out their new space. It’s been a lot of fun hanging out with families and kids all day though, and makes for pretty easy photography.

The National Aquarium recently released juvenile Black Banded Sunfish on the eastern shore, and asked me to tag along to photograph. This species of fish is functionally extinct in Maryland, and was repopulated by Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources and the aquarium after years and years of work to breed them in captivity. This was the first group released into the wild by the aquarium.

The Greater Baltimore Committee hosted a handful of Stakeholder Dinners this month that were a nice change of pace. These felt much smaller, and more intimate events that gave me more options to work with than the typical corporate event.

P.S. Happy one year to this newsletter! I don’t know if anyone’s followed since day one, but thanks for coming along on this ride. This has been a great place to reflect on my work and my process, and I hope that any one who’s read these or scrolled through my photos has gotten something from it.

One of the strange parts of being a freelancer is balancing the creative and business side of things. I’ve written about this in the past, and it’s something that I’m still working on. I’m happy to say that right now the business end is mostly taking care of itself. I have solid clients that have come back to me on a regular basis, I’ve had a few clients discover me on their own, and my finances are starting to balance out. Because of this I can start investing in the creative side of things and I decided to do that with a personal project.

For as long as I’ve been trying to work as a professional photojournalist, folks have brought up personal projects as an important element of that. They show editors your interests, give you space to try new things or make some mistakes, and generally help you approach work in a new way when you aren’t under pressure to make images in a certain manner. This is the first time that I’ve felt stable enough to really start one with intention — The Speed Project was definitely a personal project, but that sort of fell in my lap.

I’ve decided that I’m going to spend the next few months documenting the Farm Alliance of Baltimore’s Black Butterfly Teaching Farm. I heard about this space years ago, and was immediately drawn in by their mission. The goal of the Black Butterfly is to create an urban farm in South Baltimore where a cohort of students can learn about food production for a season, then transition into operating their own plots of land, and hopefully become the future farmers of Baltimore. They don’t have a group of students this year, but there is a staff working the farm that sells and donates the produce as things continue to grow. The city government has even shown its support and granted them a historic long-term lease on the land that facilitates real investment in the space (including a pavilion, barn, and fruit tree orchard that I believe are all coming in this season).

I was already food obsessed as a kid who would watch Food Network and old reruns of Iron Chef growing up. I went on to get some cooking jobs and learned some skills. Then, I went to Italy and had my culinary horizons expanded. I tried to recreate the meals that I enjoyed abroad at home and realized that the quality of the ingredients just wasn’t the same here. I wondered why that was and answering that question became a motivation to learn more about food production in the U.S.. As I was then trying to find a professional angle of what kinds of stories I wanted to tell I kept following that curiosity and started documenting local and artisan food producers and telling their stories. The Black Butterfly is just the next step in following this passion for me.

It is also an amazing way for me to structure a creative practice. I’ve been doing my best to get out to the farm once a week since April (I think I’ve only actually made it out about 5 or 6 times). Every time I go out though I get to walk the same spaces, look at things differently, think about the light differently, and try new things. I’m already finding myself drawn in by the patterns and abstractions of certain plants, the contrast between nearby houses and the farmland, the textures of the different materials that are used in farming, and the labor of the folks that tend to the farm.

I don’t really have a plan for what a completed version of this project looks like. Maybe it’s a photo essay, book, or a gallery exhibit. I’m trying not to focus too much on those things for now though and just learn to keep investing in my creative practice. I think the biggest thing for me right now is just creating images that feel different. Things that don’t look like “agricultural” photos that I’ve seen before, or photos that I would feel nervous to submit for an assignment.

Back in March, I had the opportunity to serve as a team photographer for my…

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As I wrote about in my last post, about a month ago I had the incredible opportunity to photograph The Speed Project for the second time. Good news, Lupe absolutely crushed it, coming in fifth place of about thirty runners, and making it from LA to Vegas in 103 hours total. Bad news, I’ve been feeling really overwhelmed since I came home.

Between sorting…

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Maryland high schools are currently wrapping up their Winter sports playoffs which means I’ve been busy. Last night was a Boy’s basketball Regional final at Mt. Hebron, tonight I’ve got another one (different region obviously) lined up in Bowie. Not sure if I’ll get hired to follow these teams all th…

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This past week the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette announced it would publish its final issue in May. This decision was made by the owners at Block Communications citing that they’d lost approximately $350 million over the course of 20 years.

My first major internship after graduate school was with the Post-Gazette. It…

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As I mentioned in an earlier post (How to See Pictures), I took the name for this newsletter from the contact sheets of the film photography days. Contact sheets were basically the easiest way for film photographers to review their photos without having to fully develop and print their whole roll. It shows all of the photos from a session in detail and …

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The first time I started freelancing full time was not my choice. I had been working as a contract food writer for an online publication that suddenly ended my contract. I had intentions of transitioning into freelance photo work while holding onto that job, but immediately found myself thrust into the deep…

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