Off on yet another adventure, Tristan and I rode into the wilderness of the Fakahatchee Strand Preserve in Southwest Florida to photograph some gators. This area is nothing like the wilderness I used to run through as a kid in New England. The strand is called the Amazon of North America, and it’s the largest linear swamp in the world. Luckily we had a four-seat four-wheeler, and it was dry season, so it wasn’t pure muck. But nothing prepares you for the spiders. The headlights of the four-wheeler barely illuminate the massive webs and spiders moments before you go barreling through them. Then it’s a panicked search (at least for me) to see where the spider went.

Anyway, we drove out to one of those locations where cell phone service doesn’t exist. We found gators swimming in the water and snuck up on a few along the bank of the swamp. We also rode out into the middle of a field to do some night sky photography. Good times.

Night trip into Fakahatchee Strand

No parent should outlive their children. But this year nearly 150,000 infants, children, teenagers, and young adults will die in the United States. They leave behind parents who will spend the rest of their lives struggling to cope with with loss of their children.

The type of death rarely matters. It could be a drug overdose, car crash, or illness. What caused the death fades as time moves on. But the pain remains as strong as the day they passed.

Marriages fail. Medical bills pile up. Basic things, like getting out of bed, become unsurmountable obstacles. Some lose their drive to be a part of their communities.

This story looks at the lives of parents years after their child’s death — when the outside world doesn’t want to hear about their dead children and expects a return to normalcy. It explores broken human bonds, and the endless search for a parent’s new identity in the social fabric of American society.

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Parents at a Loss

Um, well that was pretty epic. This event, called DayGlow rolled into town and turned Germain Arena into a giant subwoofer.Large guns shot neon paint into a crowd of teens and twenty-somethings wearing mostly all white. Just a color feast.

Oh, and whoever invented earplugs is my new hero.

License Images

Paint Party

The Swamp Buggy Races are always a favorite event of mine, and this past weekend I was fortunate enough to cover the Winter Classic. Lots of crazy fans, mud and racing made for a great time. It’s usually hard to describe what a swamp buggy is to people who have never seen one before, and it’s even more difficult to describe how they are modified to fly around a track filled with muddy water. Every time I go there is always something different to see. I usually go early so I can hang out in the campgrounds as all the partiers slowly wake from a wild night. This time was only the second time in the winter classic that a woman took home the day’s top prize. Bonnie Walsh leveled other racers with higher caliber swamp buggies. It’s always an exhausting day of coverage, but definitely worth it.

Swamp Buggy Races – Winter Classic

This past weekend I had to opportunity to photograph the Naples Winter Wine Festival auction again. This event is probably the most over the top function I have ever been to. Millionaires are bidding on round the world trips and Mercedes all the while putting money into organizations that help the neediest children in the county. It’s held at the Ritz, in a huge tent filled with enough bottles of wine to get a small army hammered. For me, it’s best described as a five-hour party where everyone wins… this year more than 12 million dollars were raised.

Winter Wine Festival

That being said, I needed to go in a different direction. I wanted something more integrated with Photoshelter. Photoshelter really provides so many useful tools to photographers it’s ridiculous. E-commerce, portfolio, SEO… you name it, Photoshelter does it.

So I decided that I would build my own site in WordPress. Only hours into the code, I wanted to give up. A month, countless message boards, support sites, and a nervous breakdown later, I was ready to launch.

Hopefully this site will be better integrated with my archive and I’ll be able to feature more content quickly. I’m excited for the new ways in which to show my work. Stay tuned…

New site!

In 2001 a woman named Amalia Mendoza was in a car accident on a rural Colombian road which resulted in the loss of most of her face including her hair, both eyes, nose, and sections of her skull. After years of frustration, one of Amalia’s daughters brought her to America to seek the help of David Trainer, a specialist in facial prosthetics, in the hopes he could give Mendoza her identity back.

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The Resurrection of Amalia

and to boot, dolphins showed up to help us remember that they would whoop us in any swimming competition.

Full Triathlon in Naples

Favorites from Naples News in 2011

In 2009 Southwest Florida became ground zero for the economic downturn in the United States. It was one of the top regions for foreclosures and jobless rates quickly rose over 10 percent. While investors were making millions of dollars buying and selling the foreclosures, middle class families were being evicted, living in hotels and sleeping on neighbor’s couches.

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Florida Foreclosure Crisis Parts I & II