While contests like these don’t really mean much, I still thought it would be fun to enter them just to see what happened. I doubt I will enter any pay-to-play contests in 2022. Photography is such a subjective art that winning in one of these contests shouldn’t blow your ego up anymore than not winning should tear it down. Just go out and shoot and have fun.

Earlier this year, around February 2021, I finally just bit the bullet and ordered a Leica M10 Monochrom from the Leica store in San Francisco. This was the first brand new Leica that I’d ever purchased. I’m not ashamed to admit that I had tears in my eyes as I opened the package. I don’t know what it is about the Leica bug, but I have it big time. Opening a Leica camera is akin to buying a new iPhone or computer from Apple. Each company puts in a lot of effort into their packaging and it just adds to the mystique of their products.

I woke up Sunday morning to an email congratulating me on one of my photographs receiving an honorable mention. It was from the ND Awards, a photography contest that I had entered earlier in the year.

A brand new magazine for creatives called Lots has just issued its inaugural issue. I’m excited to be featured in their Street Photography section.

We took a trip to Santa Cruz over the Labor Day weekend. We usually go to Aptos when we come to the area but my youngest wanted to stay in the mountains for a change. We found a nice Airbnb in Boulder Creek, a small community in the Santa Cruz mountains. It was a nice change of pace to staying at the beach. I can’t say I like it more, but it is nice to change things up now and then.

We had been mulling over several options to get away for our 25th Anniversary week and we finally decided as a family to head down to San Diego. We were there in Mission Beach with my wife’s extended family in 2017 and had a great time, so we thought perhaps we could recapture some of that magic.

This past weekend my wife and I took our 17 year-old daughter down to San Francisco for the weekend to experience Pride weekend. She is a lesbian and has a hard time meeting others where we live so we wanted her to know what it felt like to be around lots of others like herself.

I was in a weird place when I arrived at the start of the weekend and I left with even more confusion and some clarity at the same time. We spent all day shooting Saturday and then spent all day Sunday critiquing each other’s work in the most brutally honest way I’ve ever experienced.

On a beautiful weekend at the end of March, my wife and oldest daughter went down to Napa for the weekend. The weather had been rainy and cold for most of the month but the sun and warmth came out for that weekend. Before our trip, I had recently received Lomography’s 800 speed color film in the mail and I was anxious to try it out.

During the weekend of March 23-24, I attended a 2-day black and white workshop with renowned street photographer Alan Schaller. It was a fun but tiring weekend and I learned a lot, probably more than from any other workshop or class I’ve ever attended.

We took the opportunity to celebrate our 25th Anniversary a little early in the year and booked a cruise around New Zealand.

I met up with Amy, a friend from college, for a Documentary Family Photography shoot. She suggested I shoot her and her kids while they played a around of golf. Turns out Amy’s son and daughter are both on the golf team in High School and Amy thought it would be fun to capture them in that milieu.

This past weekend we went out to Folsom Lake to watch my niece’s High School Mountain Bike team compete in a race. It was fun to see her compute in such a wonderful sport.

With a few days left of vacation time, we decided to head down to our favorite part of California: the Monterey Bay. We usually stay a little north in Aptos but there was nothing available at the last minute so we booked a place as close to Carmel as possible in Pacific Grove.