My name is Kai and I'm a complicataholic.

I used to grit my teeth and ignore the frequent requests from people who yell, "Take my picture!" at me. And while I'll usually snub the people who aggressively refer to me as "Photo Guy" during these requests, I've amassed a fun little collection of goofy poses while on assignment.

After four years on the job here, it sometimes feels like I've seen just about all the assignments there are. Sure, there are plenty of potential big-time events that I didn't get to cover, but it seemed like the basic, daily-grind shoots had all been done.

It's hard to gauge your growth as a photographer. I remember confidently flipping through magazines and newspapers in college, smugly thinking I had this photojournalism thing figured out pretty well with every photo I saw that I thought I could have made.

I love basketball. Growing up as Blazers fan, that love was estranged for some time, but it rekindled while covering games at legendary McArthur Court. I remember starting out at the Oregon Daily Emerald and eagerly shooting my first couple of games.

You'd think a SWAT team standoff would make for an exciting assignment. The sight of armored vehicles and assault rifles certainly draws a crowd and the air of potential danger can get your blood pumping on sidelines, but as I wrote before, it's a grueling illustration of "hurry up and wait."

Avoiding cliché is a constant goal of mine. I'm often unsuccessful, though, and after ripping off somebody else's idea to try and spice up 2010's year-end recap, I'm falling prey to the biggest cliché of them all by sharing some of my New Year's resolutions.

As I mentioned during last week's Grinchfest, the holidays are also filled with plenty of fun and heartwarming stories, so I figured I'd share some in a vain attempt to prove that my heart is not two sizes too small.

Once the turkey-wine-and-starch hangover wears off, holiday season dread starts settling in for me. I'm no soldier in the supposed war on Christmas, but there's plenty for me to loathe in the most wonderful time of the year. Chief is how boring I find the majority of holiday-themed assignments.

There's no shortage of difficult situations to cover in this job. While there are some in the news biz who get a rise out of covering tragic situations because of the possible contest implications, but most of us are happy to avoid the sadness whenever possible. And though critics often clamor for more positive stories, dodging negative news would be a huge disservice to our readers.

The crushing cloud of Black Friday carried over last week for the Mustangs and Braves as the pair of perennial pigskin powerhouses were punched out of the playoff picture during a doubleheader at Lampson Stadium in Kennewick.

Avoiding camera awareness is an ever-present part of my job, and being the stranger with a two-foot ponytail and big cameras makes me pretty conspicuous most of the time. It's not tough to avoid stares when there's a lot of activity going on or you've spent a lot of time with a subject, but neither is usually true during feature hunts — especially ones where your subjects look interesting while strolling down the street.

After a whirlwind start to the football season of planning and shooting several season preview portraits, I missed all but a couple games of the regular season. Due to another schedule change, I'm back in the thick of local pigskin, just in time for the playoffs.

Falling circulation and advertising sales have shrunk the news hole. While a smaller staff sometimes means we're scrambling for daily content, more frequently, space is at a premium in our print edition.

Humor is a good crutch to lean on for portraiture. If your subject is uncomfortable in front of the camera, crack a joke to loosen her up. Even terrible jokes can work if it makes someone realize the photographer is a bigger dork than he is. If there are multiple subjects, I like having them reminisce about funny situations to get a more spontaneous feel to the set-up situation.

There's no doubt this job doesn't always feel like one. Hot air balloon rides, crazy court scenes and the rodeo are fun assignments that highlight some of the joys of making photos for a living.

The photos we want to make don't always jive with what the event organizers had in mind. Some media relations people seem genuinely shocked when I dismiss their suggestion that I snap a smiley handshake in front of a logo and sign orgy. Thankfully, many of the media handlers we work with frequently aren't that controlling during these carefully contrived situations.

We may all be unique snowflakes, but I guarantee everybody shares at least one pet peeve.

Trying to see familiar situations in fresh ways is a constant challenge, and photographing construction sites epitomizes this daily struggle.

High noon light is the bane of most photographers' existences. While the hard overhead light and deep shadows can yield some interesting photos, portraits at this time are especially difficult to handle. The angle of light creates unflattering shadows on the subject, and popping a little flash is the easiest way to handle it.

Covering centenarians' birthdays is often a groaner gig for community photojournalists. I don't think anybody begrudges families for wanting to get their elders featured in the local rag. They do seem to come in waves, though, and I'd be lying if I said I don't roll my eyes in the multi-100-year-old birthday weeks.

Last Friday was a mix of pleasure and pain. The Dust Devils' first game of their championship series against Vancouver spoiled what would have been a football-filled Friday, and their 6-3 loss seemed all the more sour after the Gravel Pit Championship between heavily favored Chiawana and Pasco was much closer than expected.

In the wide world of sportraiture, I have always struggled with baseball. The culture of the diamond makes it hard to single out the gems on a team. While I am far from an expert, my theory is that baseball teams depend on depth more than any sport. You could have the best pitcher in history on your team, but he's only going to throw in a minority percentage of your games. This means teammates often jeer at whomever I'm photographing.

When I was in high school, I probably couldn't have told you who the starting quarterback of the varsity team was. I attended an occasional game, but I didn't care about the team. Fall sports revolved around water polo, which I played.

It's hard to measure your progress when you're constantly shooting. Like the proverbial frog in the frying pan, sometimes it doesn't seem like you're improving at all. While it can get tedious to photograph the same event in consecutive years, the bonus is having a chance to compare how you saw it both times.

I often rant about the importance of selecting the right sports photo to fit the story of the game. Unless the shot is uniquely spectacular, I avoid the SportsCenter mentality of visual reporting and pick a photo of the local team doing something negative if they lost or something positive if they won. In track and field, I look for shots of people who actually won their events.

I started this blog three years ago with the goal of explaining some of the quirky and often misunderstood aspects of community photojournalism. It's a job seen as nothing but easy fun by some, and an afterthought by others — even in the newsroom. Just because a photo is capturing a split second in time doesn't mean you can always just pop in and snap a quick shot in five minutes.

It's hard to believe my fifth Follies is in the books, and though I didn't have quite as much fun covering the boat races as I did while photographing last year's riverfront house party story, last weekend's unmatched variety provided me with some Herald highlights.

Nobody will argue that life is full of imperfect moments. The clichés that try to make sense of these missteps are just as numerous. People tend to ignore this universal knowledge when it comes to photos in the paper, however. I've had people complain to me about the "horrible" photo I took of them just because it wasn't a posed snapshot in which the subject had a chance to deploy the photo face she developed over the years.

Capturing the right moment can be tough. I whine about it all the time in a vain effort to educate people about the horrors of community photojournalism. No, I don't just take photos, I try to tell stories with my images, and in that process I get to talk to people. Sometimes, though, the tough part isn't making the image, it's getting the name associated with it.

After a refreshing change of pace last Fourth of July, I was back on a familiar saddle this year, rehashing Pasco's Grand Old 4th Parade before snapping some pretty firework photos. But what usually is a busy weekend looked to be surprisingly light in my fifth year of holiday coverage.

What's appealing for people to read isn't always as fun for us to photograph and write about. Maybe the best example of this when we have to go out and localize stories about gas prices. The text usually revolves around holiday travel statistics and local AAA gas price averages as compared to national ones, but photos are a little tougher to make unless you're willing to settle for a dry-as-stats photo of a gas station sign.

I've grown increasingly comfortable with my location lighting skills after more than six months of working with my portable light kit. The shiny-new-toy factor has worn, too, so I don't always feel like I need to use it, but when I do, my increasing understanding of its abilities and limitations means I spend less time fumbling with my strobe settings and setup, and more time making pictures.

People do dangerous things.

It's hard to believe I've wrapped up my fifth year of covering high school graduations. While that's a drop in bucket compared to veteran community photojournalists, I've shot enough now that I remember what I did my first year, a little from last year, but anything beyond that takes some archive digging to figure out. And since I've already rambled on about the the ins and outs of graduation coverage, I decided to wrap up this year's batch with awards for each ceremony.

Much like sports and politics, journalism is a field in which everybody seems to be an expert. Snarky comments online from "This is news?" to more derisive digs at the Herald are as daily as our publication. Those jabs and the occasional "helpful" individual who thinks I want a posed snapshot while covering an event are mildly annoying. What really bothers me is how, with so many apparent experts out there, so many people seem to be unable to distinguish news from advertising.

When former Prosser Mayor Linda Lusk goes in for her scheduled sentencing hearing on July 8, the strange and sordid tale will finally end. What started last summer after talk swirled in Prosser has gone through several delays, changes in the defense and complaints about media coverage as well as complaints from the media about what information was available.

When I started developing my photo skills in college, two of my favorite targets to practice on were pets and bands. They both offered challenges that I thought translated well to the uncertainties you face on daily assignments. Pets are fast, unpredictable and cute, so it was always a crowd pleaser to get some fun snaps of our furry little friends. Their spazziness makes them good targets to work on focusing and anticipating. I even wrote a column for my college paper with the unfortunately punny title Practice Makes Purrfect.

A common type of photo blog post is "In the Bag," which gives gear-heads a glimpse into a working pro's camera bag. The closest I've written is this whiny diatribe about our cache of aging and broken equipment, but the topic is so ubiquitous that Vietnam-based photographer Justin Mott wrote a hilarious post spoofing the blog genre and cool-kid photojournalists' scarf affinity.

Unlike many other disciplines, the quality of photography doesn't always depend on how much time and effort you put in. This is most obvious on the bulk of assignments out at Hanford. While it's cool to be out there and see these historic reactors and buildings, long drives out, repetitive settings and security restrictions mean most of your photos look a lot like the images you made on your last trip to the reservation.

There's a sports photography joke about whether a photo has a ball. Well, maybe joke isn't the right word, since people don't laugh about it, but conventional wisdom says that a good sports shot will include the ball. This obviously doesn't apply during jube and dejection shots, but for game action, it generally applies.

As I often write, this job exposes you to a lot of things you might otherwise never think about. And after three years on the job, it's weird to think about how much time I've spent at high school athletics — especially considering that this includes several sports I don't care about. Spring is the both the culmination of the school year and this concept, with my sports shooting dominated by uninteresting targets.

People often ask me how many pictures I take on a typical assignment. Thankfully, there's no such thing as a typical assignment and frame counts can range from a few to dozens to hundreds depending on the type of shoot.

Unless you're one of my midnight Friday faithful, I'll have given a career day presentation to middle school students by the time you read this. In the days leading up, they sent me the questionnaire handed to students, which ends with, "Will your career be around in 20 years?"

Covering last Saturday's zombie flash mob at Columbia Park was the most fun I've had on assignment in quite a while. Usually shoots that I'm that excited about beforehand fail to live up to expectations, but this one manged to — even though only 150 or so people showed up when more than 500 signed up for it.

My friend Dan Hawthorne always talked about "Conservation of Greatness" during pick-up ultimate frisbee with the Desert Lorax. The popular ultimate concept says that if you perform an amazing play, you likely will make a poor throw after, restoring karmic balance in a self-officiated sport that places a lot of weight in sportsmanship and the "spirit of the game."

There were plenty of unimpressive feats of athleticism at last week's Richland track jamboree. While I understand that the early season meet is meant to allow everybody to participate and get a feel for competition, it was hard not to shake my head after seeing a javelin go 10 feet on a fouled throw.

This job exposes you to a wide variety of people, events, rituals and sports. And while I definitely don't enjoy them all, I usually gain some measure of understanding and appreciation for the things I cover. Before I started here, my knowledge of hockey was limited to Gretzky-endorsed video games, Mighty Ducks references and baseless scoffing at Fox's glowing puck experiment. Seeing the marriage of brutality and grace in person is pretty impressive, though, and photographing Americans home games grew on me pretty quick.

It's been a mopey few weeks of work. Each successive grumble seemed to propagate a few more gripes. I was desperate for a way out of my rut because wallowing in my own funk every week was making me feel like an angsty teen. And while it's easy to see how you got into the gutter, the way out is never as clear.

If I got upset every time a photo I liked ran small, my tears would have long run dry in my short time here. It's out of my control for the most part and the limitless space to publish work online helps ease the disappointment a little.

One of the more common assignments on slow days is covering presentations at local schools. Sometimes famous or successful alumni return to talk at their former schools and other times it's a promotional event.

Our monthly staff-produced Sunday Extra photo stories and essays have gone a long way toward preserving my sanity. The never ending weekday feature hunts often leave me wishing I was in Yakov Smirnoff's Soviet Russia where the features would hunt me, introducing some much needed excitement into my day.

My oft-lamented dreary winter feature hunts are probably getting to be as laborious to read about as they are to execute. However, through all my teeth gnashing, head shaking and feet dragging, I do realize that driving around all day in search of photos is a far cry from the truly tough jobs countless people do every day, and getting paid to do it is a blessing when considering how many photojournalists vastly more talented than me have lost their steady gigs in the last few years.

When our story last left off, I had cobbled together a portable light kit in an effort to stop sucking at portraits. As it often goes in this business, things don't always synch up like you would anticipate. If our advertising staff sells a lot and we end up with a big news hole, it's bound to be a slow news day and the same is painfully true when the versa-type of vice squeezes a busy day full of news into a tiny paper. So, of course, the usually steady stream of portrait assignments somehow slowed to a trickle as soon as I got my gear.

This line of work is full of the unexpected.

As I wrote before, seeing the same annual events from different perspectives can be a challenge. Columbia Basin College's Martin Luther King Bell-Ringing Ceremony is probably the best example. Sure, being here for the summer of 2007 as an intern means I've had an extra year of Water Follies and graduations, but the bell-ringing was my first assignment as a full-time staffer on Jan. 21, 2008, and I've covered it every year since then.

This job is full of the unexpected. About to eat your dinner?

During a photojournalism class at the University of Oregon, professor Julianne Newton gave us all assignments to cover all the general categories of photography. When our spot news assignment came up, I signed up for a couple ride-alongs with Eugene police figuring that was my best shot at catching something unplanned.

As 2010 wraps up, I'm approaching my third year anniversary at the Herald — Jan. 21 for those of you looking to buy me a present. In this time, I've grown comfortable, always a dangerous feeling when creativity is the keystone of your profession.

While I often extol the storytelling power that still photographs can convey, sometimes the best a silent frozen moment in time can give you is a gist of what happened.

Aside from shooting Atomictown covers, when the unquestionably prominent usage of my photos motivated me to pack up our heavy studio lighting kit, I was often very limited in how I could approach my daily grind portrait shoots. With only a 2-foot off-camera cord to get my strobe off my camera, there are only so many lighting tricks to dig up. For shots involving one or two people, this isn't a big deal, but when you have to get a group shot in tough lighting conditions, it's difficult to walk away with a photo you like.

Last weekend, I made the trip to Tacoma with sports writers Kevin Anthony and Craig Craker to cover Kamiakin and Connell's state championship games, capping off a football-filled season that started back in August with our season preview. I wrote last week that I was looking forward to finally covering a close game featuring the high-powered, multi-faceted Kamiakin offense that usually forced the Braves' hapless opponents into desperation mode by the second quarter.

Covering Kamiakin High football games this season had been a frustrating assignment. Longtime readers may remember my gripes from a couple years ago, but this season's grumbles stemmed from a wholly different reason.

Do anything for long enough and it's easy for strange things to become mundane. While the people who wishfully tell me how much fun my job is are right about some of my tasks, I've pointed out some aspects that suck big time — facets that people often overlook when assuming my days are filled with happy snaps and pretty pictures.

I used to bristle when people gushed about my staff-issued cameras, but with my gear’s current state of disrepair, all I can do now is shake my head and laugh.

While covering this year’s State Cross Country Championships last weekend, somebody asked if I’d rather cover cross country or Water Follies. Tough call. While I had a blast covering the boat races this year, the state meet always offers me an intriguing glimpse into the balls-to-the-wall nature of the sport. There’s something so twisted about distance runners. Quotes from legend Steve Prefontaine like, "A lot of people run a race to see who is fastest. I run to see who has the most guts, who can punish himself into exhausting pace, and then at the end, punish himself even more," epitomize the masochistic badges of honor these athletes truly compete for. To recycle the opening from last year’s blog about the same event, my favorite cross country shirt read, “My sport is your sport’s punishment.”

My craptacular portrait skills are most often employed on the news side of the paper for business stories or features, but our sports staff also come looking for photos to accompany their features. Cleverly called "Sportraits" by some, these photos can be a headache to make depending on where and when the athletes are available.

Another election cycle is entering its luteal phase and what’s old is new again. The seemingly endless debate over moving the county seat from Prosser continues, the Letters to the Editor mailbag is overflowing with local political junkies' endorsements and real life versions of Red vs. Blue may cause a shift in the political balance, which will ultimately result in the same fruitless back and forth between moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats we’ve all grown so accustomed to.

Often, we only get one image to tell our visual side of the story. Numerous factors are weighed before making the final decision and sometimes fun photos are edged out for one reason or another. Here are a few recent ones.

Tuesday started in a way that's been all too typical lately. Our new reporters haven't started yet and the skeleton crew is spread even thinner with trials and elections in full swing. This, of course, meant a feature hunt was in my future. Our increased reliance on these stand-alone photos means the low-hanging fruit is long gone for this season. And while I should probably stop whining and figure out something more meaningful to photograph than cute kids, it can be tough to catch your breath in the daily grind long enough to dig a little deeper.

While I've often pointed out my portrait sucktitude, there's another area of my photography that's even more deficient. When it comes to scenic shots, I just don’t get excited and I think that apathy shows. To me, pretty shots of scenery are good for the ceilings above dentists' chairs and for showing off to friends to make them jealous of that super sweet hike you went on.

Successful layering has been one of the biggest challenges in my photographic development. To pull it off, you have to somehow harness the often chaotic scene before your lens and place your subjects in an informative and compositionally sound arrangement without directing them.

Readers of my rants and connoisseurs of photojournalism know that the prettiest picture isn’t always the best one for the story. Often times, my favorite shots from a take fall short of this storytelling requirement.

While I enjoy covering high school sports, I rarely get excited about games, especially during the regular season. With no local allegiances to any teams, more often than not, I’m just rooting for a conclusion. Last week’s historic first time face-off between Chiawana and Pasco stirred an anxious thrill that I hadn’t felt since my college days of covering Ducks football and basketball. Just like those days, I was much more excited about the game day atmosphere than I was about the game, so I showed up about an hour early and worked out a good parking spot by the ramp at Edgar Brown Stadium. Interestingly enough, the number of photographers on the field was the most I’d seen since my college days, as well.

Working on the Herald's football preview section in the past had usually been frustrating for me. Photo requests for featured players would come pouring in the week before publication with shoots scheduled during practice times. Sometimes you could swing by before or at least get them to have some game jerseys ready, but for some athletes, all you'd get is a few minutes with a sweaty kid in practice scrubs. If you're lucky, you can get them away from their teammates, who would make things tougher by taunting the featured players, but your time is also constrained by the coach, who is often more interested in his star player getting more snaps from behind his center than in front of my camera.

Despite my previously professed love for rodeo, it’s not all fun light,

Without a real Michael J. Fox/Christopher Lloyd joint to draw inspiration from, I’m not sure where to start, but really, I’m not sure where this idea even came from.

One of the best parts about this job is that it takes you places you’d never go just for the fun of it. And while I feel it’s necessary to always go into these foreign situations with an open mind, some things just don’t float your boat. Sometimes, though, you find something that makes you wonder where it’s been all your life.

It’s hard to believe I’ve been blathering away on this blog for two years already. In that time, my desk has amassed an assortment of mementos, press passes and inkjet prints of goofy outtakes; I’ve gotten a taste of how the daily grind of this job distorts your perception of time; and, apparently, I’ve gotten worse at making pictures.

Of all the things I've covered in my time here, two drownings have been the worst. There's something so draining about a drowning scene, seeing distraught loved ones helplessly waiting and probably clinging to hope that the victim will be one of the lucky few who survive prolonged submersion.

On my fourth trip through the whirlwind of Water Follies weekend, I did my best to deviate from the formula I've followed since my internship year. After kicking it off the same way I always have, by covering Art in the Park on Friday, I spent the majority of my Saturday focused on a specific story angle as opposed to my usual amorphous feature hunting.

Many factors come into play when selecting photos for publication. And though the nature of community journalism means we usually cover the same events every year, we try not to overload on any particular subject or person.

Most sports fans cheer for teams because they’re local. Some follow teams as a link to a former home and some are swayed by future Hall-of-Famers. Off the clock, I’m no different, but when I’m working, I root for the outcome that best fits the photos I’ve made.

Covering the same events year after year can be tough, so when I found out I'd be covering Basin City's 4th of July parade last Saturday, I was excited.

The biggest perk of working in a small market is the access you can get. Rolling in with confidence and a couple of expensive cameras is all it takes at many events and the knowing nods and smiles have only come easier the longer I’ve worked here. Of course, there have been plenty of exceptions.

While I love baseball highlights, I’ve never really cared for the sport. And though I’ve gained appreciation for it while working on the story of the Burgess Brothers over the last couple months, it’d be a stretch to call myself a fan. What I’ve always appreciated was the amount of skill needed to play baseball, even if major league physiques don’t always project an image of professional athleticism. There is a level of physical conditioning required to play the sport, and as I recently learned, a certain level is also sometimes needed to cover it.

After covering CBC's Queers and Allies club's first drag show on May 25, I expected some reader backlash. Readers complain and threaten to cancel their subscriptions with reasonable frequency, and even though drag shows have become mainstream, the Tri-Cities are pretty conservative. Having written a weekly blog for nearly two years now, I was banking on countering some angry feedback as my topic for the following week.

It didn't seem like a year had passed since I last lamented the crush of graduation coverage, but last Friday started with a deep breath and a sigh as I headed out to cover Othello and Connell's graduations.

It’s natural for people to put their best selves forward when the newspaper photographer comes to make some photos. Houses are cleaned, shirts are tucked and guts — both physical and behavioral — are sucked in. It’s my job to get past these contrived roadblocks and try to capture something real amidst the Cheese effect. While working a story in-depth, it’s only a matter of time before rapport and comfort cause most subjects to forget about me, but in the daily grind, it’s more of an ethical judgment as you try to find the gems.

While covering my first Tri-Cities Fever game as an intern in 2007, I witnessed a local phenomenon when Cotton Eye Joe came twanging over the loudspeakers:

As journalists, we have to balance the public’s right to know and reader interest with compassion. Some may scoff at this notion as they envision the nosy, pushy reporter intruding on private lives and grief in order to better her career or earn him a bigger paycheck. There certainly are people who fall into this category, but for the most part, the journalists who work crappy hours for meager wages do so to try and tell stories that matter.

If I had to pick just one sport to shoot exclusively, it would definitely be track and field. I’m undoubtedly a bigger fan of basketball and football, but the variety at a track meet — from the myriad events to all the various angles and approaches you can take for each — makes it an easy choice for this hypothetical desert-island-type scenario.

Many of the technological advancements in camera equipment are most practically applied in creating sharper images. Since Niépce first captured a day-long exposure of the view from his window, we now have fast-recycling flashes to make up for the lack of light and high ISO films and their digital equivalent. The main camera body I use at work, a Canon Mark II N, is able to capture images with exposures as fast as 1/8000th sec. Long gone are the days in which portrait subjects have to remain motionless as their souls are transferred to glass plates.

Shooting covers for our free weekly entertainment guide Atomictown is one of my favorite assignments. They’re not always fun, and seldom easy, but they give me a chance to work on my lighting skills. The covers we shoot are usually local theater productions. The stage lighting isn’t always adequate since they are so high overhead and tend to create ugly eye-socket shadows, so if I have the time, I like to pack up our studio lighting kit. The three flash heads in the kit give me a few more lighting options, which is helpful when trying to convey a sense of drama, as was the case when Katrina Carlson and Korry Watkins starred in the Richland Players' production of Rabbit Hole:

By now, you’ve probably heard of Gizmodo’s exclusive sneak peek of what is supposed to be the next iPhone. Gawker Media, which owns the technology blog Gizmodo, has been very upfront about its $5,000 payment to an opportunistic bar patron who found the prototype after Apple engineer Gray Powell apparently forgot it.

Even with all the planning, timing and anticipation that goes into making a good photograph, it never hurts to have a little luck on your side.

On Monday, nonprofit WikiLeaks released a classified U.S. military video from a July 12, 2007, incident in which Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and driver Saeed Chmagh were killed in an Apache attack that left a dozen dead and wounded two children. Reuters had filed Freedom of Information Act requests for the video, but it didn’t surface until sources that WikiLeaks cite as whistleblowers from within the U.S. military provided the footage and supporting Rules of Engagement documents.

Back in college, I usually covered every sporting event from start to finish, but the realities of reduced staffing and strong encouragement not to accrue overtime means that more often than not, I go shoot a game until I have decent options for whatever the outcome. This changes during important end-of-season and postseason games, however, so when the Americans had a chance to close out the Chilliwack Bruins during the first round of Western Conference playoffs last Friday, I was bracing for the long haul.

One of my biggest problems on assignment early on was making sure I got names. It wasn’t like I forgot to get them, but sometimes I’d get caught up in making frames or trying different angles that I’d lose track of where people went. I lacked confidence in working a scene to interrupt my photo making to get names, ages, quotes and cities of residence, and came back to the office several times without names to accompany my strongest photos.

I’ve had mixed results in my quest to stop sucking at portraits.. The freedom in these assignments can be both blessing and curse. In pretty much every other aspect of this job, you deal with what you have. Bad lighting, messy backgrounds and camera shy subjects are just a few of the daily hurdles we encounter. People and animals can act and move unpredictably, and things have a way of not working out as you had hoped.

Another high school basketball season has come and gone, and despite my hope for photo redemption after last year's hoops, my schedule this year allowed for even fewer chances to actually cover some games instead of just covering my ass with some serviceable photos. And though my first opportunity came on a jam-packed Saturday, I was excited to actually shoot a few games in their entirety.

I’m always interested in showing what happens behind the scenes, and ever since I started working the Tri-Cities, I always thought it would be cool to produce a time-lapse video of one of the many conversions that happen at the Toyota Center for the variety of events at that facility.

Covering local events can sometimes be a challenge when your subject views the local paper as nothing more than free advertising. Nowhere is this more apparent than when I'm tasked with covering an expo or fair.

A few controversies have popped up amidst the round-the-clock coverage of the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti and its horrifying aftermath. Ranging from local bickering to national disgust and international mixed messages, these types of arguments, gaffes and head-turning pronouncements are unavoidable whenever news of this magnitude arises. Equally unavoidable are the photo-related controversies that rile up shutter bugs and photojournalists, but seldom garner much attention outside the journalism world.

I had hoped to find some sort of Western-themed feature spot for the third installment of my Back to the Feature series of blog posts, but will instead settle on a surprise return to the feature, much like Marty’s return to 1955 that startled Doc and made him faint.

Two words, when used in conjunction, send shivers up any news photographer’s spine.

When you work for a newspaper, people aren't the least bit bashful to tell you that you and your organization aren't worth the toilet paper that could have been made from the 40,000-odd copies we distribute daily. Somebody will tell you one day that that you're too conservative and another will lambaste you the next for being too liberal. They laugh and call you the Tricycle Herald for printing too many fluffy features and then write in to complain that you're always focusing on the negative in the community. There's a couple grammatical errors in a couple thousand inches of text? Clearly, we have monkeys editing copy.

When reporter Paula Horton and I accompanied the Peak Putters and the All Wheelers Off Road Club on a run at Juniper Dunes back in November, I was excited — not only because it sounded like a fun, hands-on type assignment, but also for the chance to redeem myself after a lackluster take at Sand & Sage Sports Car Club’s final autocross race of the season one month prior.

After a holiday season bursting with feel-good features and events to cover, January just seems so boring.

My Christmas shift this year was considerably easier than last year, when my day included a stop at the Union Gospel Mission:

The year 2009 will be remembered as the year that newspapers emerged like a phoenix from the ashes of a troubled industry and economy to...oh, who am I kidding? It was mostly bad news. The Rocky Mountain News closed, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer became an online-only publication and countless others in the industry lost their jobs.

Following people door to door on assignment always seems to be a challenge. If people are selling things, handing out fliers or trying to get a petition signed, they generally already have a tough enough time without a photographer joining them on the front porch. As a photojournalist hunting for real moments to shoot, the natural reaction to having your picture taken as you answer your door to talk to somebody you don’t really want to deal with makes achieving this goal difficult. Working on private property further complicates things because you also need permission from the property owner.

With our six-week rotations, assignment types tend to come in shifts. Last season, it felt like non-stop basketball, and while I've covered a few hoops games this year already, my impending rotation to the day shift means I'll miss out on most of the season.

Despite the amount of practice I’ve had, I think portraits are still my weakest skill. I’m certainly competent enough to produce well-composed, simple portraits, and can make a nice photo of somebody with a flattering smile without many problems. But as a photojournalist, I strive to make storytelling images in unconventional and fun ways. These grand plans often fail miserably, however, and I default to Plan B.

Work in any job long enough and your pet peeves are bound to multiply into a menagerie, often cross-breeding with other annoyances to create unforeseen mutants that make you question your will to live.

The passing of Thanksgiving not only kicks off the holiday shopping season, but also the season of giving, iconically manifested in an of army bell-ringers who greet and see you off at the store. The season of charitable stories, however, has been in full swing for about a month.

Every job has its occupational hazards, which can range from carpal tunnel syndrome and a fat butt to deaths of varying discomfort. Even something that sounds safe and fun, say making pictures for a living, has its own risks.

"My sport is your sport's punishment," is the best cross country team shirt I've seen. I don't remember which team was wearing it, but I think that sums up the sport perfectly. The masochistic nature of the sport isn't something I'm sure I'll ever fully understand. While I have run a couple 5K's on a whim and felt pretty good about myself afterward, I just don't get running all those miles and still enjoying it.

When I first started seriously making photos a few years ago, finding an interesting angle was everything to me. I’d spastically scuttle around whatever scene I was working in search of holes or interesting frames to shoot through. Potentially informational elements were often reduced to OOF (out of focus) blobs since I’d just discovered the joys of shooting wide open.

One of the greatest challenges of community photojournalism is seeing events in different ways year after year. Even during my brief time in the Tri-Cities, I’ve had to cover the same event two or three times. This, of course, pales in comparison to the veterans on staff, who will probably look toward my direction when they read this and shake their heads.

When we last left off, I had made a picture of a guy in front of a wall. Granted, it wasn’t just any old wall, but a wall that had been the object of my desire for nearly two years. That wall probably thought it was pretty special, but this town is full of attractive walls. Little did it know that its yellow and purple color scheme also reminded me of the Lakers — a team I would root against in a matchup versus a prison squad of convicted rapists.

I often write about emotional or ethical difficulties I encounter on the job because those are the problems that most people don’t realize even exist. Sometimes, though, the biggest hurdle on a particular assignment is simply technical.

People at emergency scenes are like women. The more experience I have with them, the less I'm able to predict their next move.

I’m a big baby about heights, so when I was assigned to cover The Great Prosser Balloon Rally last Friday, I had mixed emotions.

The turning points in great football games earn simple monikers that solidify their legendary status. San Francisco fans have "The Catch" from Joe Montana to Dwight Clark in the 1982 NFC Championship Game, Bronco fans have "The Drive" by John Elway and Oregon Ducks fans are still fired up before each home game at Autzen Stadium with footage of "The Pick" by Kenny Wheaton.

The local baseball season has ended and as we move onto football and volleyball, I can't help but look back at the spring and summer of baseball. By virtue of scheduling, I ended up shooting a lot more baseball than I ever had before in my short career. I've never been shy about my aversion to covering baseball, a point I wrote about earlier this year, but as I said before, just because I don't like shooting something doesn't mean I’m satisfied with making boring photos. My quest for improving my baseball portfolio fell short of a triumph this year, but I'm not too disappointed either.

If you're like me and detached yourself from just about everything this past Labor Day weekend, you might have missed the controversial publication of a photo of Marine Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard, 21, of New Portland, Maine, right after being mortally wounded by a rocket propelled grenade in Afghanistan. The photo shows Cpl. Bernard bloody and wounded, with his legs apparently missing, as fellow Marines try to help him. The Associated Press released the photo over the objections of Bernard's family, and even Defense Secretary Robert Gates was moved to try to prevent distribution of the photo.

More often than not with this blog, I try to keep in perspective that though it's great to make a living behind a camera, it's still a job and it's not always fun.

David Webster has been in the news since 2002 when he was arrested for and ultimately sentenced to 26 years in prison for assault and murder-for-hire after biting a woman's eyebrow off and trying to hire an undercover police officer to kill her.

The Tri-Cities market is small enough that we seldom experience media swarms. And though there is competition between the Herald, three TV stations, Northwest Public Radio and KONA radio at the stories we all cover, for the most part, it’s respectful. There’s no blatant attempts to ruin other people’s shots or interrupt interviews, and rarely is there a subject juicy enough to whip the media into a piranha-like frenzy.

It's been one year since I posted my first photo blog, and to be quite honest, I'm surprised that I was able to maintain my self-imposed weekly deadline, even future publishing items for when I'm gone on vacation.

I wrote back in January that if I didn't get better at covering tragedy anytime soon, I'd be OK with that. Luckily, I haven't had to cover anything terribly tragic since then, but that changed in a big way on Monday, Aug. 3, when Carlos Rivera, 16, of Pasco, drowned at Schlagel Park while swimming with friends.

The Tri-Cities’ biggest event of the year has come and gone. And while the extent of our visual coverage has changed drastically in the three years I’ve been covering it, my weekend tasks have not. Since summer 2007, when I was an intern and my hair only reached my lower back, I’ve covered Art in the Park and hunted for features up and down the Pasco and Kennewick riverbanks.

Back in May, we ran a story about how ethnic minorities make up the majority of the populations in Franklin and Adams counties.

Sunday shifts seem to be drought or monsoon. Often, Sunday serves as a day to make up for any overages accrued on the much busier Saturday shift.

Hot-button topics earn their apt moniker from the hard metaphorical line they draw in the proverbial sand. The debate surrounding these issues can drag on for decades, neither side willing to yield an inch.

Summer. To some, it means barbecues, bikinis and boating, but for us, it means Cool Desert Nights, construction, brush fires, boat races, baseball, the faire and the fair. It's almost too bad there's so much going on this time of year because summertime is stocked with features, ripe for the hunt.

A certain amount of luck is needed when cruising for feature photos. The trifecta of light, moment and composition is necessary for a great photo, though sometimes we have to settle for as few as one component.

Last week, education reporter Sara Schilling talked to some Chief Joseph Middle School eighth-graders for a story about their last day of school and what they’ve learned during the past three years. Of the last day activities we could photograph, kids throwing pies at faculty faces for fundraising fortune was the clear choice.

Tri-Cities rolled out a fresh batch of graduates last weekend, but the mutual feeling on the photo staff opposed the impending pomp and circumstance in the days leading up to commencement ceremonies — none more so than I, who had to head back from Boston the day before my kid sister's college graduation to help cover our local high schoolers' milestone.

Stamps may be worth 44 cents now, but seeing our photos run at that size seems pretty worthless. True, the two column width size, which is about as small as photos are published in the Herald, is about 3 1/2 inches wide, making it bigger than the average stamp. However, a wide-angle shot is just as unreadable at the two-column size as it would be if it had been slighted even further.

I'm new enough at my job to still have aspirations of greatness. It remains to be seen if I actually have the talent and persistence to make an indelible impression in photojournalists' lore, and though self-doubt and cynicism slowly seep into me, I haven't given up yet.

A few weeks ago we ran our weekend package on what the Hanford stimulus money means for the Tri-Cities. Different articles examined the money's impact on the Tri-Cities' population, housing, crime and schools. When the package started taking shape the photo department received an email with a list of photos needed to accompany the stories.

When crime reporter Paula Horton asked me if I was free to go along on a potential kitten rescue operation, I had to feign hesitation. Granted, I hadn't had a lunch break yet and was right in the middle of working on a photo gallery for the Salmon Summit, so it was easy to act disinterested.

On Monday, I had the opportunity to photograph Jodi DeCola and her daughters Cassidy and Reagan Grace.

When I heard the Tri-Cities would play host to one of the nationwide Taxed Enough Already (TEA) parties a couple weeks ago, I knew I wanted to cover it — not because I agree or disagree to any fanatical degree, but because I lived in Eugene for six years while Bush was president. As I started honing my craft at the Oregon Daily Emerald, I covered my fair share of left-wing rallies protesting everything from the war to the suspension of habeas corpus. Aside from some small counter-demonstrators, I hadn’t covered any large right-wing rallies during the last eight years.

The crack of the bat punctuates a warm day in cliché Americana. And while Cracker Jacks have waned in popularity, for some, "I don't care if I never get back" still rings as true as it did when baseball was the undisputed American pastime.

You know your product has arrived when its brand name becomes a verb, and Photoshop has held that distinction for quite a while now. But while the worst that has come to brandverbs such as Google and Xerox is brand-name association when being incorrectly used with an inferior product (I'm talking about you, Ask Jeeves), Photoshopping has had an ugly history in modern-day photo manipulation.

Access is a funny thing.

I have a job that many people envy. Photo enthusiasts often gush about the fancy cameras I'm shooting with, or how great it must be to make pictures for a living. They lament about not being able to attend a sporting event for work or how they spend their paid hours under fluorescent lights, staring at a desktop picture of Maui as they daydream of fresh air.

More often than not in this job, five minutes early is right on time. Show up early and you can scout a portrait location or chat up your subjects and build rapport. Sometimes, you can elicit secret information from the people in charge of the event, such as who the special award winner will be, who's important and who is likely to erupt into a Springer-esque brawl.

What I used to love about shooting basketball has turned into what I loathe about it.

As I mentioned before in the classic BtF post, "Cheese," avoiding camera awareness is a constant struggle.

During the winter storm, snow features dominated our weekdays. Tired of scraping ice and plodding along unplowed streets, I performed snow-melting dances every day, anxious for when the streets would be clear and dry again.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced Thursday that some media would be allowed to photograph flag-draped coffins returning to U.S. soil at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, if families agree.

Readers are a fickle bunch.

The most ubiquitous type of photo published in community papers has got to be the crowd-pleasing kid photo.

Forget Holmes.

A television reporter once asked me if I ever felt like a vulture. It was shortly after the fatal accident at the go-kart track last April and he seemed troubled by the effect media coverage may have had on the grieving family.

Environmental portraits are one of the most common photo assignments — often our only option when there’s no action to document. Sometimes the verb of the story is either past or future, and sometimes it's a glorified way to put a face to the quoted.

One year-end recap is definitely not enough for someone as self-absorbed as I am, so here are my off-field favorites from football season.

A photojournalist's actions sometimes seem to conflict with reason. When there's a big fire, we run toward it.

What a year.

You may have been expecting something Christmas-related or perhaps a column about all that snow we're having.

"Good things come in small packages. Just ask my wife. She’ll tell ya," Herald sports editor Jeff Morrow proudly proclaimed recently, referring to his wife's petite frame.

Access is a funny thing.

Sometimes you get what you wish for.

One of the biggest stories of the year has been the chronicling of Chocolate's progress.

I've always been pretty good at entertaining myself.

The only thing more scarce than golden hour are my chances to work in the ideal lighting conditions.

As a photojournalist, I'm often at the front line of newsworthy events in this community.

People often ask me how many photos I'm taking while on assignment. Usually it seems to be out of genuine curiosity, but sometimes the inquiry comes off as combative. Maybe the person is annoyed by the number of pictures I'm taking because he or she is trying to keep up appearances while the newspaper guy is there, in which case the excessive snaps are an attempt to wear down the subject until he or she presents a real moment.

If power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, then what about minuscule amounts of power?

I don't get too many reader responses, so I'm always surprised when I do.

I wish I was invisible.

When I came into the office in March, my boss asked me what I should always answer in a photo caption.

As far as PR stunts go, this one was pretty fun.

As far as cliché descriptions go, the photojournalist's attempt at being a "fly on the wall," is pretty apt. You're never really entirely invisible, but you stay out of the way and generally speaking, people don't really want you there.

Although I love shooting basketball, I always look forward to the season's sunset when games really matter because that opens up the possibility of publishing jubes and dejection.

Reporters sometimes lay awake at night, worrying whether they got all the facts right in their stories. They tear at their hair in anxious anticipation as an internal debate boils over calling the late editors to check for the fourth time that they found every mistake they had made by spelling "Johnston" as "Johnson." They pace around on the bare concrete in their hovels until the bottoms of their feet blister, waiting for the paper to be delivered so that they may catch a couple fleeting hours of rest before doing it all again.

Sometimes a touching story comes along.

The litmus test for whether a graphic photo can run is often called the "Cheerios test" or "breakfast test."

A college instructor once told my class that being five minutes early was right on time.

"You just take pictures?"

Inexpensive digital cameras have made photography increasingly accessible and prevalent. You probably know a couple photographers or at least some snapshooters.

There are few things I enjoy as much as successfully capturing an interesting moment in time when not a single subject cares or is even aware of me.