new composition

When I was at the South West Photo Journalist Conference a couple weekends ago (see that post here) I was encouraged to push myself in my photography. My portfolio reviews were a little disappointing because nothing "concrete" came of them; I found that I wasn’t doing anything wrong, but I could be doing so much more. One way is to really jump into my photos, allow myself to almost be part of them, get into the fray and play with my subject in a way that created depth in the photo. This last weekend I did just that at the Wisconsin protests, below was one of the first images I took and my favorite…mostly because I jumped into it from the beginning. I saw these guys mocking government up on a big flat bed truck, most people stopped to take photos but stayed down on the ground, but I decided to jump in the truck with them. If you look at more of the photos (here) you may see that I did this more than once; when I climbed into a semi-truck, or jumped onto one of the tractors...always with permission of course.

[note to self: next time bring a note pad to take down peoples names and contact info. Also your monopod so that you can raise your camera up above the crowd.]