People peer through a construction fence at a new "model hutong" constructed in advance of the Beijing Olympics

I just got back from a week in Beijing, documenting the city's preparation for the Summer Olympics. It's my third trip to China and my first time in the capital city. I came to the story with some mixed feelings about the direction of China's development. It's clear that the economic growth of the last ten years has made countless people's lives better throughout the country. Construction jobs have allowed for migrant workers to come to these urban areas and support whole families with the work they do building Beijing's skyscrapers and Olympics venues.

At the same time, I've seen firsthand the effects of unregulated environmental pollution that threaten to undercut the country's progress and that affect a large portion of the population on a regular basis. I remember one village I visited in a rural part of the Henan Province where they could no longer even come into contact with the river that ran through their village, as it would cause blisters on their skin, all due to a fertilizer company that dumped its production byproducts directly into the water.

How this all will shake out in the future is anyone's guess. It's clearly not in the best interest of many people for China to have a bad Olympics, but real human rights and environmental issues remain unaddressed and I'm often left with the feeling that China cares more about the appearance of cleaning up the environment and giving concessions to human rights than the actuality of it. With all that said, China remains an endlessly fascinating and dynamic subject that I hope to photograph for many years to come.

On Digital Journalist, I wrote about my experiences covering the McCain campaign in South Carolina.

I'm also pleased to be part of Wonderful Machine and humbled to be part of such a talented group of photographers.

(The title of this post comes from one of McCain's oft-repeated jokes on the campaign trail when he's asked about his age being a liability to his campaign. How it actually helps his case is anyone's guess.)

In prepping my images for my new Photoshelter archive, I came across images from two shoots I did with Commander Charles Swift from 2006 and 2007. Swift represented Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama Bin Laden's driver, in a case against the United States (Hamdan v. Rumsfeld). He won the case, but was forced out of the Navy because of it.

It's rare to get two opportunities to photograph someone like this and I was going over the submitted images from each shoot and found the differences interesting.

Shoot #1




Shoot #2




I was also reminded of Joe McNally's great advice to do your reshoot now, i.e. shoot the heck out of the assignment, try different things, fail occasionally and leave feeling creatively spent.

As for me, the first and the third picture seem to capture Commander Swift best as I saw him.