Livingston Harper for Newsweek

The gap between shooting a story and actually seeing it in print can be long, and I've learned to treat the assignment as an end in itself, with any resulting tearsheets as an unexpected surprises.

In February, I went down to Mississippi for Newsweek to spend the day with Congressman Gregg Harper's family. Their son, Livingston, has Fragile X Syndrome and Congressman Harper has been an outspoken advocate of the condition and the need for more awareness and funding. The family could not have been more accommodating of having me there and I'm grateful for their patience.


Saya Barkdoll and her daugher Taylor

The second assignment for the story was much closer to home, and I spent a wonderful afternoon and evening with Saya Barkdoll and her daughter, Taylor at their home in Maryland. Taylor underwent multiple surgeries soon after she was born to correct a number of malformations. She's now an outgoing seven year old who whizzed through her homework with her Mom and proceeded to borrow my camera to take some photographs of her. Michelle Cottle's story is here.

IRS Commissioner Doug Schulman for Government Executive

Changing gears a bit, I had a very brief shoot with IRS Commissioner Schulman that resulted in a cover image and spread inside of Government Executive Magazine.



Lastly, I'm immensely honored to have been chosen for American Photography 28, with one of my images from the Closed Car Dealership series. You can see the full slideshow of images here.

I'm rarely able to slip away to photograph when traveling with family, but instead seek out rewards that present themselves closer by, in those between times of movement and stillness. There are a few of those moments from my trip to Buenos Aires last week.

I've struggled a bit to write about this project, which feels simple in scope, but has become more difficult as I've begun looking over the initial images I've shot.

The basic idea is to walk the entire border of Washington, DC which allows me to see a solid cross-section of the city, economically, socially and topographically-- through dense forests and along the rocky shores of the Potomac, approximately 35 miles total. What comes of this is still up in the air, but I'm determined to push through and just finish the walk before spending too much time thinking about it.

To that end, here's a few images from the first fifteen miles.

I received my Canon 5D Mark III's last Monday and have been shooting pretty much every day with them ever since (short review: AF finally works, thank goodness, and the hand grip is deeper, which is nice). In perusing the online reviews, I saw a mention of the Silent Shooting Mode. Having used this on the 5D Mark II, my impressions were that it was a pretty interesting idea, but badly implemented. Basically, on the Mark 2 the mirror would stay up as long as the shutter button was held down, making for an exceptionally long blackout time and having to consciously think about releasing the button every time you took a picture.

With the 5D Mark III, the feature has been improved immensely and essentially just slows down the mirror a bit to decrease the sound of it hitting. You get a slightly longer mirror blackout, but otherwise there's no difference except for the sound, which is ridiculously quiet. Like, quiet enough to proclaim on Twitter that it seemed even quieter than my trusty (read: unused) Leica M6.

So, is it?

In search of some answers (and waiting for some RAW images to be outputted), I set up a little test, placing both cameras on a couch and measuring the sound of their shutters using dB Meter Pro on my iPhone. I initially was going to put a lens on each one, but sadly, I sold my last Leica lens a few years ago, and have for some reason held onto the M6 body thinking that one day I might pull it out again and run few rolls of Tri-X through it. So, I decided to do the test with the shutter caps off (hello sensor dust), and the iPhone positioned about two inches away from each (yes, I measured).

Anyway, on to the test. I did five actuations for each (both at 1/500), making sure the phone's microphone was positioned the same distance away.

Here are the numbers (measured in dB):

Leica M6 : 100, 101, 103, 102, 102.
Average: 101.6 dB

Canon 5D Mark III (in Silent Mode) : 98, 99, 99, 98, 100.
Average: 98.8 dB

Here's an audio file, with five actuations of the Canon, then Leica. As you can hear, the Leica's shutter sound is shorter and a bit sharper, while the Canon is stretched out a bit, but sounds more dampened.

So, what does this all mean? Comparing a film camera that ended production in 1998 with the latest/greatest from Canon doesn't really count for much of anything, except that the Leica has always been held up as the paradigm of quiet-- the camera by which all others are measured. More importantly, this is a killer feature for a camera that seems to have fixed the majority of the issues its predecessor had, and then furthers its appeal by improving a feature that most photographers didn't even know existed.

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, did not make the final edit

I quietly launched my new web site two weeks ago and have been making some small tweaks to get everything just right before making it official last week. In addition to larger images, the site is as simple and stripped down as I could manage, while employing some pretty cool tech under the hood (PHP templating system that outputs clean HTML, image preloading to speed up browsing).

But more importantly, the work better reflects what I do right now, the mix of lit portraiture and reportage that make up the majority of my work. I've also put up some new stories that only existed in blog posts or scattered across the web.

With the new backend, I'm committing to regular updates, like a portrait I shot last week.

In addition, I'm regularly updating my Tumblr and Instagram, both of which are nice places for photographs that don't have a home elsewhere. Please do have a look around!