Category Archives: Newspaper

Photo of the Sports Now, vol. 2: Hail to the soccer victors!

Last week the Dearborn Press & Guide asked me to photograph the Michigan men’s soccer team’s NCAA tournament game against Central Florida.  Specifically, the P&G asked me to photograph two of the players, Dearborn natives Hamoody and Soony Saad.

This was my first-ever Michigan soccer game, so unsurprisingly, this was also my first-ever visit to Michigan’s gorgeous new soccer stadium and my first experience with the highly entertaining student section, the Michigan Ultras.

Yes, they’re as crazy as they look: like any good self-respecting soccer crowd, they made noise the entire game.  It made for a great game atmosphere.

The pregame:

The game:

A few minutes into the game, Soony crumpled to the ground in pain after contact with an opponent:

But a few minutes later he recovered and was able to play the rest of the game.

The game went into overtime with the teams tied at 1; halfway through the first overtime, Hamoody took a free kick that was deflected into the goal to win the game.  Obviously, both he and the student section were excited.

Soony was pretty thrilled, too.

The brothers (and the rest of the team) gave out autographs to some excited young fans.

Photo of the Now, vol. 201

Last Friday, I visited La Jolla Fine Jewelry in downtown Chelsea to get a few pictures of their jewelry-making process for an upcoming feature in the Standard.


No, La Jolla doesn’t sell strange blue rings.  These are the wax forms used to design the rings and cast the molds.


Owner Curtis Gough looks over some of the molds he’s accumulated over the years.


“…And then I put the marshmallow in there and heat it until it’s ready for a tasty s’more.”  (Seriously: he uses the torch to melt the metal of choice in the Gravy Boat of Doom — well, maybe I can’t remember its real name, okay? — and then he spins the whole thing around like a playground merry-go-round to force the metal into the mold to create the jewelry.  Hooray, physics!)


Stephen Kolokithas isn’t mixing a drink; he’s mixing the mold material.  You don’t want to drink that material unless you want a mold of your esophagus.  (You don’t want that.  You really, really don’t.)


That’s DEFINITELY not pancake batter.


Do they ever take off those magnifying visors?  My sources say no.  In fact, I suspect the best jewelers are born with magnifying visors on their heads.


When his employees get hungry, Curtis bakes a batch of tasty cookies in La Jolla’s oven.  (Actually, he’s putting a mold into the oven; about an hour later, he’ll take it out, and it’ll be baked solid, but not tasty.  Then he can pair it with the Gravy Boat of Doom.)


Curtis still works with his mother, Gloria; however, Gloria doesn’t enjoy being in front of a camera, so I had to settle for getting a photo of a photo.


Okay, so this is just plain cool: Curtis has a laser welder to help him with his very precise work.  He told us the welding beam is thinner than a human hair, which makes it somewhere around the width of the average supermodel.  I know it’s hard to imagine, but it’s true!  (The part about the beam, not the part about the average supermodel.  Science still has no way to measure the thickness of the average supermodel.)


Though the laser welder is cool, the craft of a jeweler still requires low-tech hands-on work; here, Curtis is grinding down the prongs before he mounts the jewel.


A jeweler’s workbench, Curtis told us, should always be a bit of a mess; that means he’s busy.  (Does that mean my messy desk is a good sign, too?  No, probably not.)  Here, Curtis is busy forming the prongs around the jewel.


When I showed Curtis one of the pictures I’d taken, he glanced at the screen, decided the image was too small, and flipped down his magnifying visor to get a better look.  (That’s not what he’s doing here; he’s still seating the jewel in the mount. This just happened to be the best opportunity to tell that story.)


This is a glimpse inside the outrageously cool laser welder.  The jewel is now mounted on the ring, and Curtis is using the welder to secure the diamond to the prongs.


What, you think it’s just automatically shiny and pretty when it comes out of the mold?  Of course not!  Stephen would never let a piece of jewelry go out the door without the proper finishing work.

Photo of the Now, vol. 186: Ha ha ha! edition

Last Friday, Editor Terry and I visited the Ann Arbor Comedy Showcase to gather material for an upcoming story.  Upon finding the club — which is cleverly concealed in the basement of a restaurant — we watched the first show (well, I took some pictures, too); after the show, he talked to the comedians (two openers and a headliner) while I took a few more pictures.

Did I laugh?  Yes.  And since I was there on business, I’ll be able to deduct that laughter.  (No, not really.)

Photo of the Now, vol. 179

A couple months ago, several CHS musicians were honored at the state level.  The Standard put together an article about the musicians and their accomplishments, and Editor Terry asked me to shoot portraits of each of the musicians to accompany the article.

My first victi…uh, subject was Viktor, a cellist.  For his session, we decided to take advantage of an open field behind his house; he sat down on a chair in the middle of the field and started playing, I started shooting, and we ended up with the shots you’re about to see.  And, as a bonus, I got to spend most of the session listening to beautiful cello music in the great outdoors on a perfect Michigan spring day.

Viktor (15 April 2009)

Photo of the Now, vol. 175

On Saturday, the Chelsea Retirement Community — or, as any self-respecting Chelsea old-timer would call it, the Methodist Home — undertook a formidable task: it replaced every last one of its incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs in an effort to cut its energy consumption.  How formidable was this task?  Well, while it’s fairly simple to unscrew one light bulb and screw in another, it’s a bit less simple to do that for more than 2,200 bulbs.  The newspaper wanted a few pictures, so I joined the fun for an hour to document the laborious undertaking.

Light bulb changing (4 April 2009)

Photo of the Now, vol. 173: Tasty Edition

Last week, Reporter Sean was doing a story on a Dexter family that produces maple syrup, and he asked me to come along and shoot a few photos to accompany the story.  The interview turned out to be fascinating and educational for both Sean and me, and it didn’t take long for us to learn perhaps the most important fact about maple sap: when it’s boiling on the evaporator, it smells exactly like graham crackers.  Not just a little like them, but exactly like them.

Other important maple syrup facts:

• To be tapped, a maple tree needs to be at least 40 years old.  That may sound like a long time, but maple trees can live to be even older than Larry King, so that still leaves plenty of productive years: the lifespan of a maple can be as much as 300 years, which means a tree could be tapped for over 250 years.  If you’re keeping track, that’s longer than the United States has been a country.  If you’re not keeping track … well, it’s still longer than the United States has been a country, and George Washington would like to have a word with you.

• It takes 40 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of syrup, a ratio that makes maple syrup production very much like American Idol, except American Idol doesn’t have such a delicious conclusion.  Also, this means you can thank those other 39 gallons of sap for that graham cracker aroma.

• Production is dependent on the weather: when the temperatures are below freezing at night and above freezing during the day, the sap will flow.  Without those weather conditions, you’ll collect only imaginary sap, and imaginary sap tastes good only on imaginary pancakes.

• It’s no wonder Canada put a maple leaf on its flag: Mountie Nation produces over 70% of the world’s supply of maple syrup.  In fact, it’s a good thing the Canadian flag doesn’t feature a full maple tree — if it did, the tree would probably be tapped for syrup.

Maple syrup in Dexter (19 March 2009)

Photo of the Variable Time Period, vol. 169

Ethan is a wonderful young boy with autism, and he and his family will be the subjects of an upcoming article in the Dexter paper.  Editor Terry asked me to shoot a few pictures to go with the article, so I joined him for the interview and did exactly that.

A number of the pictures feature a tape measure, and there’s good reason for that: Ethan is very fond of numbers, and he enjoyed counting out the numbers on the tape measure during the interview.  His affinity for numbers in general (and the tape measure in particular) was the motivation behind the focus in the last shot.

Photo of the Variable Time Period, vol. 136

Newspaper shoot: The Great Chelsea Shopping Center Fire (5 May 2008).

Two weeks ago, I was sitting at home processing pictures when I heard sirens in Chelsea. Normally I don’t pay much attention to sirens in town, but this was different: there were more sirens than normal, and they just seemed to keep going. Eventually, when I remembered to turn on my cell phone, I found out what had happened: the Chelsea Shopping Center caught fire, and the fire was swift and dangerous enough to prompt several other area fire departments to respond. (Apparently it was a slow news day, too, because it also prompted the Detroit media to respond.) I wasn’t able to make it to the scene while the building was on fire, but I was able to get a few worthwhile shots of the damage.

The fire never broke through the roof, but smoke and water damaged seven businesses (one of which managed to reopen the next day!). The cause of the fire appears to have been an electrical malfunction.

Most importantly, nobody was injured.