Leap Day in the sunshine

Owen Dixon, 4, of Fayetteville smiles as he takes a moment to lie in the sun while playing with friend Andrew Simmons in the volleyball pit in Gulley Park in Fayetteville.

While we were all hustling though our days, Owen was smart enough to stop and enjoy the sunshine. I should never have grown up. That was a total mistake.

You, again?

Kevin Caillouet, a gardener at the Fayetteville National Cemetery, uses a cleaning agent to clean markers and prevent them from becoming discolored at the cemetery.

In times of trouble, when I cannot find a feature anywhere else, I head to one of several places here in town including the national cemetery. Today was one of those days. I stopped Caillouet and he immediately said, "You, again?" and laughed.

I guess I've been desperate more often than I thought. When I can spell his name without having to ask, that's when I'll know I need to find another honey hole.

Chica Jueves — Cecilia Figueroa

 

Cecilia Figueroa, 25, is this week's "Chica Jueves" feature for La Prensa Libre, our sister Hispanic publication.

Shooting this at Carnal Hall on the University of Arkansas campus was a challenge because I was so pressed for time. The "Chica Jueves" assignments can be tough because seldom are we able to spend the amount of time we would like to spend on something like this. This would have been so much better with a bit more light and time. Yet, I really like this photo. It's funny how consistently I come away from these shoots with one photo that I really like.

Click here for more photos.

Ducked out at the last minute

 

Longtime Central Emergency Medical Services paramedic Doug McCradic uses a CEMS computer to input information after a call at the CEMS Station 5 in Fayetteville. McCradic is one of four CEMS employees who are taking part in developing the community paramedic program through online education.

Fellow paramedic Melissa Mitchell and program participant was sitting in a chair behind McCratic near the center of the frame, but she decided to get up and move to avoid being photographed.

It would have been nice if she had stayed where she was seated since she is part of the program and she balanced out the photo nicely. Oh well. Doug's been a good sport for me for a long time.

OK, that's just funny

Tim Huebner, a University of Arkansas freshman from Springdale, right, listens as Happy Hollow Elementary School student Zipporah Brechwald, left, gives ideas about starting a chocolate business as team members, from left, Garrett Whitehead, Carson Griggs and Carson Moore, listen during a Students in Free Enterprise's Willy Walton's Chocolate Factory event at the Sam M. Walton College of Business on the UA campus.

Garrett came up with the name "What the Fudge?" for the group's fictitious business they were tasked with creating. That made me laugh.

Disappointed

Fayetteville junior guard Manny Watkins, top, scores in the lane ahead of the Springdale defense during the Purple Bulldogs' 65-58 come-from-behind win at Fayetteville High. The game was the final game held in the gymnasium after 60 seasons.

I've been putting so much energy into preparing for tonight. Fayetteville trailed the entire game but came back to win and the students rushed the floor, putting a storybook ending to the special night. Sadly, I had to have my photos in to make deadline before the end of the ballgame. That's something that I have grown used to, though. It's the hard part of the job. It stings so much to have people say, "Ah, you missed it! It was amazing!" because my job is to not miss it. But deadline is king, and at times it makes it impossible to stay to see things like this.

Adding to my disappointment is someone, either intentionally or accidentally, turned off a camera that I had set up to take photographs every minute for the entire day so I could make a movie with the frames and see the final day of the gym. It stopped taking photos at the start of the boys game, so it missed everything.

I should have stayed in bed.

First in line

 

Washington County Judge Marilyn Edwards, left, fills out paperwork with Washington County Clerk Karen Combs Pritchard on the first day candidates for public office could file with the county in the clerk's office in the county courthouse in Fayetteville.

Edwards is always first to file her paperwork to run as county judge. She was once the county clerk and says she files early so she can have time to help others file their paperwork. It's become a tradition to see her file right at noon.

Found him!

Drew Rudasill sits dressed as Waldo from "Where's Waldo?" fame as the Fayetteville High School senior class has its group portrait made in the school's gymnasium.

I don't care who you are, that's funny. There was also a young man who decided he would wear a reflective yellow safety vest. I imagine the flashes that the photographer was using made that vest explode when they went off.

Gas leak

 

Fayetteville police block westbound access to North Sycamore Street as Fayetteville Fire Department personnel work at the scene of a natural gas leak.

The smell of gas was very powerful and the repairs went on for hours.

Mardi Gras

Members of the Krewe Carnaval do Brasil walk along West Dickson Street in Fayetteville during the annual Parade of Fools Mardi Gras parade.

Growing up in Kentucky, Mardi Gras meant very little to me. I sort of understood what it was, but as a Catholic, this week was more about Ash Wednesday than beads and parades. But I think that helps me to photograph the parade because it's so new to me. Wow, the color is something else, isn't it?

Coming to an end

Students, from left, Baylor Griswold, 13; Courtney Soulsby, 13; and Alex Smith, 12, talk while watching a Fayetteville High School girls basketball game in Bulldog Gymnasium on the FHS campus. The gym will be torn down at the end of the basketball season after 60 years of use.

This makes me sad, which is funny. I didn't go to school at Fayetteville High School. I moved to Fayetteville in 1993, after graduating from college. Yet, I've spent so much time there and made so many friends of the people who I met there that it's sad to see this old gym demolished. The plan is to knock it down over spring break, which seems so soon.

Reporter Rose Ann Pearce wrote a very nice story, available here.

My quiet wish

Fayetteville junior guard Manny Watkins (32) drives to the basket as Har-Ber senior forward John Vaughn, right, and senior guard Evan Johnson (25) defend during the first half of the Dogs' 67-55 win at Wildcat Arena in Springdale. The Lady Bulldogs lost, 54-40, to Har-Ber's Lady Wildcats.

The difficulty of lighting Har-Ber's gym coupled with the impending demolition of the current FHS gym has me hopeful, if not a bit anxious. I have strobes mounted permanently at Fayetteville Highs' gym which makes shooting a game a simple matter of showing up, turning them on and plugging them into a set of transmitters and receivers that tie them to my camera. They are positioned in a way that gives the best light, too. Har-Ber is not as easy. In fact, it's the toughest of the gyms that I shoot in because of the lack of electrical outlets and how I have to set the lights up. The angles aren't so great and the yards of gaffer's tape that I have to use each time while laying down extension cords gets expensive. I hope that, as the FHS gym comes together I am able to work with the coaches and athletics director to get everything situated as well as I have it in the old gym.

Pranks

 

The "Strengthen the Arm of Liberty" monument, now located north of the main entrance to Washington Regional Medical Center, has been taken off the list of the National Register of Historic Places in the wake of its move from its former home at the former location of WRMC. The medical center is working to have it included again on the list.

When this statue was located behind the former medical center location along North Street, it was fun to go and take photos of friends standing in front of the statue. If I shot upwards and excluded the hospital, it looked as if they were  tourists in New York City.

Chica Jueves — Alejandra Pérez

Alejandra Pérez of Fayetteville is a 19-year-old freshman at the University of Arkansas and is this week's "Chica Jueves" for La Prensa Libre, one of our sister publications.

We help the staff at La Prensa Libre to shoot their "Chica Jueves" features so they look as nice as they would like them to look. I didn't have much time to spend on this shoot because I had another assignment across town an hour after I was set to start.  I had to shoot two models in three dresses each, so I was really rushed. Yet, Pérez was such a natural model that I loved what I got, despite being so pressed for time. It's funny how often we stumble upon a person who has such natural talent at modeling. So often, it is not the case, but there wasn't a bad photo of Pérez in the bunch, just some that were better than others. This one has to be my favorite.

More photos here and here.

Pérez was featured on this site earlier while she was a student at FHS here.

Jinx

 

Regina Butcher, a customer service representative with the city of Fayetteville's Billing and Collections Division, right, uses a credit card machine to process a payment for a utility customer at the city administration building. The City Council is considering dropping the 2.5 percent convenience fee normally applied to customers' bills for the use of a credit card when making a payment.

The women in the office at city hall laughed when I showed up to get a photo of one of them using the credit card machine. The line of folks wanting to pay their utility bills had apparently stretched out the door before I arrived, and nearly every one wanted to pay using a credit card. Not that I was there and wanting to shoot a photo, the line of people disappeared and the customers they did have were all paying with cash. I was there for a while until finally someone paid with a card.

I laughed and told them that I was really bad luck when it came to things like this. If I needed a shot of a bicycle on a trail for instance, I might see a unicycle and a tank drive by before someone rode past on a bike.

Eating up some CF cards

Parker Meinecke competes in the final round of the Class 7A West Diving competition at the HPER Building on the University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville. Meinecke won the boys division at the meet.

The pool in the HPER Building on the UA campus is very dark, tomb-like. To shoot photographs of someone standing still is difficult enough in that dark, but shooting someone flying through the air is really tough. I rely on the shotgun method. By that, I mean I shoot a lot and I do so at a large file size so I have something to work with when it comes time to edit what I've shot. The problem with this is the file sizes are so large that it fills up my compact flash cards very quickly. This frame was the next-to-the-last frame that I shot before my card filled up. I was deleting photographs from a shoot earlier this weekend in between divers trying to free up space. It was a nightmare.

St. Valentine's Day

Jeanie Hall, right, and her daughter, Jackie Hall-Weiland, both co-owners of Showcase Florist in Fayetteville, work to prepare roses for St. Valentine's Day at the shop.

At the former Red Hibiscus florist here in town, I spent time with a florist as she, like Hall, stripped much of the thorns from a barrel of roses ahead of St. Valentine's Day. I took a photograph at the instant the young woman ran her hand over several thorns. The sour face that she made was really funny, and I always think of that photo when I am sent to a florist in the days leading up to the holiday.

Prodigy

Jackson Brandt, 10, of Fayetteville, left, plays the violin as couples dance during a performance of "The Sweetheart Waltz — Love Conquers All," a program featuring members of the Washington County Historical Society's Heritage School to mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. The production features dancing and music as school members described the events in Fayetteville leading up to the beginning of the war based upon wartime letters from Fayetteville native Erasmus Stirman. The group will participate in the Arkansas Living History Association's annual conference March 2-4 at several location in Washington and Benton counties and plans another free performance of the program March 2 at the Fayetteville Town Center.

As the crowd was gathering in the large public meeting room at the library to wait for the program to start, Jackson entertained us with music played on the library's piano. Before the performance, the organizer of the Heritage School informed the crowd that Jackson was a prodigy of sorts, even asking his piano teacher to speak. She said he had only had about five lessons, but it sounded like he had been playing, and practicing, for years. When he stood up to play during the performance, I just had to get him in the paper.

Over exposure

Stark Ligon, executive director and chief disciplinary counsel for the Office of Professional Conduct for the Supreme Court of Arkansas, shows one of many files he and his office has been tasked with attempting to return to the more than 2,000 former clients of Fayetteville attorney Gregory Jones after Jones left town last summer.

While shooting for this assignment, I had to make sure that none of the labels on the boxes of books could be read in the final photograph. I decided it would be easier to over expose the labels rather than try to avoid getting them in the photograph. The only group of documents without huge signs with names of businesses and individuals was luckily the one that Ligon decided to leaf through to show me what was contained within the books.

Amazing

Ruby Sims, left, Ghaith Al-Musharaff and Lulu Collins, all kindergarten students at Owl Creek School, laugh and scream while taking part in a performance by local musicians Kelly Mulhollan and Donna Stjerna as they perform as Toucan Jam for students through a grant from the Arkansas Arts Council.

Kelly and Donna are such a treasure. Their show is a fun trip around the world and features fables, music and musical instruments from around the world intermixed with many fun moments of crowd interaction. The ease with which they make music is amazing to me. I teased Kelly before the show that he can pick up an office chair and make music with it, while I can't even tune a radio.

More difficult than it might seem

Steve Jacoby, principal at Fayetteville High School, left, hands out certificates to a group of FHS students who were named as finalists in the 2012 National Merit scholarship competition and one who was named a National Achievement Scholar during a ceremony at the school. Seventeen National Merit finalists is a new record at the school. Present for the ceremony were Andrew Bakewell, Emile Blouin, Erin Boss, Brandon Fross, Katherine Gea, Kaitlyn Hurlbut, Andrew Kaiser, Hunter Latourette, Macy Manning, Peter Montgomery, George Paulson, Carlin Purcell, Hyrum Richardson, Robinson Rutherford and Emily Webb. Bethany Sykes was named a National Achievement Scholar. Not present at the ceremony were Tyler Steiner and Rachel Zweig.

This is one of the toughest assignments that we have, and there are several like this one every year. It's not obviously a difficult assignment, either. At least not at first glance. We wanted to somehow get a story and photograph to feature the school-record 17 Merit Scholar finalists at Fayetteville High, but wanted to avoid simply shooting a group photograph. Those are not terribly interesting and the get ignored by readers when they appear in the paper. I was really glad to see Jacoby hand out certificates just moments after I took the dreaded group photo, because it gave us a genuine moment to photograph all of the kids together and allowed us to avoid a group shot.

It also allowed us to avoid making one of the students' parents mad because their kid was not clearly visible in the photo. Parents can be tough to deal with. They can be the most difficult part of my job. They see having their children featured in the paper as a source of validation for their child's achievements, like a yearbook. But our job is to tell all of our readers, most of whom are not parents of kids in this group, about what is going on in our town in a way that will interest them. The photograph that I make has to be something more interesting than a group photo if we are to do this.

Try explaining that to a parent; it can be tough to do.

It's a good day if you're a duck

Dominique Kemper, 12, reaches to feed a duck a minnow after she, her father, Aaron Kemper and brother, Dakota Cornwell, gave up fishing and decided to feed the ducks their bait at Lake Fayetteville.

Dominique's father had the day off after surgery and decided to take his kids fishing at the lake. The fish weren't biting, so they made good use of their bait, at least in the minds of the two ducks.

Winding down

Fayetteville junior guard Sarah Smith, center, makes a move to the basket as Heritage sophomore guard Gina Britton, left, defends at Fayetteville High.

The gymnasium at FHS will be torn down at the end of the season, and its final game is Feb. 24, which is coming up soon. Depending upon who you ask, it was built in 1951 or 1954. Either way, there has been a lot of basketball played here. I'm already planning what to do for the final game and how to photograph it's destruction, which is planned for over spring break.

Tragedy

Fayetteville and Rogers high school students speak near a Rogers Public Schools bus after it struck several cars and collided with a tree in front of Fayetteville High School following a basketball game at FHS.

While turning photos from the basketball game, I was listening to the scanner and heard about a wreck in front of the school involving multiple cars and a driver who was listed as Code Blue. In the pouring rain, I sped back to the school to find a bus had plowed through several cars to come to rest in front of the gymnasium after striking a tree. The driver was coming back to the school to take the Rogers cheerleaders back home to Rogers when he reportedly had a heart attack. School officials reported that the driver had been revived but was unresponsive at the scene. One of the athletes at FHS broke in the door of the bus and tried to help the bus driver. What a terrible thing to have happen.

The black hole

Bentonville's Ryan Grimes, top, and Har-Ber's Jessie Weir compete during the 7A West Conference wrestling meet at Har-Ber High School in Springdale.

When I saw this assignment, I had to groan. Not because it's wrestling. I'm gaining a working understanding of the sport, though I am still really unfamiliar with it and it's been fun to learn something new and to shoot something different. I groaned because it was being held inside Har-Ber's Wildcat Arena, which has to be the darkest spot on the planet. I brought some strobes, thankfully.


More photos here.

Survey says...

Southwest Junior High School student Saurabh Wagle, left, thinks of an answer alongside quiz bowl teammates Alex O'Brien and Jonah Thornton during the annual Arkansas Quiz Bowl regional competition at Woodland Junior High School in Fayetteville.

I was proud to have been able to answer quite a few questions at the quiz bowl, but it became clear that I would have to brush up on my Greek mythology if I am going to have a real chance.

Back to the well

Thomas Goodwin of Fayetteville walks his bicycle up Mountain Street while on his way to get a cup of coffee at the Arsaga's location in the Fayetteville Public Library.

I saw this photo yesterday out the window of the story time room at the library while shooting something there. We didn't need it and I hated to waste such an interesting photograph, so I ate it. Luckily, we needed a feature photo today, so I went back to see if it would happen again. The photo I had made yesterday had a university student pushing his bicycle up the hill. It was really very charming. It was like throwing a fish back in the lake with the notion of catching it again tomorrow. Rain was forecast for the day, so I had hoped for a person with a big red umbrella walking in this spot over the water-darkened pavement. Wanting another person with a bicycle to walk up the hill seemed unrealistic and greedy.

After nearly an hour waiting with no one walking by at all, with or without a bicycle, I started to lose hope. Then Thomas came by with his bicycle. It totally made my day.

What I would like to be doing

Carrol Smith of West Fork fishes from a boat on Lake Sequoyah in Fayetteville while enjoying the unusually warm weather. Though the National Weather Service is predicting rain and thunderstorms for today and tonight, the high temperatures are expected to again be in the mid-60s.

When I need a photo of something, I always think of where it is that I would like to be if I could be somewhere other than work. Well...

Signing Day

Fayetteville senior Casey Perry, left, is congratulated by teammate Chris Humphrey, right, and the rest of the Bulldog football team after Perry signed a letter of intent to play football for Evangel University in Springfield, Mo., during a signing ceremony at Fayetteville's field house.

In the wake of the Dogs winning the Class 7A state championship, one would have expected a large number of seniors signing letters of intent to play college football, but there was just one. Another will come in the coming days or weeks, but today there was just Perry. Coach Daryl Patton laughed saying "It was all coaching" of their state title.