the life of m

I’m digging my new fuji x100s, but like with any new toy, there’s definitely a learning curve. I’ve been taking it out to bars at night, carrying it with me on assignments, and slowly easing into using it more and more. The quality, especially in low light, is amazing. The files open up huge (about 45 mb) and they’re tonally gorgeous (especially the b&ws that I’ve been shooting) and they’re clean (no noise), and the extra fun features like the Toy Camera, Tilt Shift and Double Exposure settings are all a blast to shoot with. I can’t wait until I’m comfortable enough with the autofocus to use it to document more than just friends and fun.

The size is perfect. It’s compact and quiet and discrete, all plusses for the kind of work I like to do. I can totally see me transitioning from the 5dmk2 to the x100s more and more for projects and stories, mainly because, and perhaps most importantly, I like the way it feels in my hand and the way I feel when I’m shooting with it. I like that it makes photography fun again. I like that while it’s very capable of being a work camera, it doesn’t feel like work — which makes me want to use it even more.

Here are a handful of pix from the first week of shooting with the x100s, mostly friends, coworkers and a random bird. Mostly monochrome, because that’s what floats my boat. And a couple of square toy camera ones thrown in for fun.

From Lane DeGregory’s story on Karen Heaton’s perfect boy:

Every night about 9 p.m., Karen Heaton heaves her son back into his chair, rolls him to the bathroom, brushes his teeth. She peels off his clothes and wedges him into pajamas, slides him onto her bed, against the wall.

“Sweet dreams, Sweetheart,” she says, kissing his forehead. Then she crawls in beside him, positioning herself on the outside like a railing. “Mommy’s right here.”

If something happens overnight, she’ll already be there. She wants to feel when he starts sweating, hear if he stops breathing. Most nights, she changes five diapers.

People ask her if she has considered a nursing home for Donnie. She can’t imagine it.

“I’m his mom,” she says. “Without him, I’m not me.”

Here’s proof that sometimes I actually do shoot with my real camera. Sadly this one didn’t run, but it was one of my favorites.

Fort De Soto Park Supervisor Jim Wilson, 55, has lived on site for 15 years. He likes boasting that he’s one of the only people in Pinellas County that lives on 1,136 acres and has over 7 miles of waterfront as his backyard — his wife is the other. Each morning he drives to the East Beach to watch dawn break on the horizon and the commuters start to trickle down the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. “I take a moment of silence and say a little prayer thanking God I’m not one of them,” Wilson said.

It wasn’t long after Jim Wilson moved his family to a new home that he and his wife were called to their daughter’s school. Brimming with sympathy, the principal and the kindergarten teacher greeted them. “Everyone kept saying, ‘We’re sorry for your troubles. We’re here to help you, we can take a collection up,’ ” Wilson recalled. “They said, your daughter came to school and said she’s sleeping in a box and living in a park.” At the time, Wilson’s young daughter liked sleeping in an oversized cardboard box. And he and his wife did indeed live in a park — Fort De Soto Park. It is there, for the last 15 years, that he has served as the resident steward of one of the most pristine parks in the state and lived rent-free in a house with no price.

Fort De Soto Park is preparing to turn 50 next weekend. Opened on May 11, 1963, as a natural waterfront recreation area for families, the 1,136 acre, boomerang-shaped island has remained largely untouched by the developers and settlers that have colonized the rest of the peninsula. Condos now creep up to the hem of the park, lining the Pinellas Bayway in Tierra Verde as though queuing up to get past the tollbooth. There is no land like it left in Pinellas County.

Read more about Fort De Soto, including fascinating things like its pet cemetery and use as a bombing range, from the wonderful Anna M. Phillips.

Favorite outtake from the next Dispatches column.

I’m trying to push myself out of my comfort zone with this new Floridian Magazine beat I’m on, so I pitched a portrait project on the re-enactors that still make their living or livelihood off of 500-year-old history. And I had a blast shooting them. During the group shot for the cover, I joked that this looked like an album cover and asked what their band name would be. My favorite answer was Chain Mail, a close second was Ponce and the Conquistadors.

It is commonly believed that Spanish conquistadors first stepped foot on this continent in 1513 near what is now St. Augustine. Juan Ponce de Leon claimed possession for Spain and anointed this new land La Florida. Now on this same land, 500 years later, re-enactors — some paid, some volunteering — bring Spanish colonial history to life at the Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park. The men (there were no women on Ponce de Leon’s ships, so seeing a female re-enactor at the park is rare) come from different backgrounds, not all of them Spanish. They might look fearsome, but they’re really teachers at heart.

Fernando Arango, 59, is a descendant of Spanish ancestors who made their way to Colombia in the 1600s. Arango is a potter and painter, who started doing reenactments because of his love of history. He has played Ponce de Leon for eight years and said he strives to “make people aware that the US has a common history with all backgrounds and ethnicities, not just the pilgrims.”

Chris Clark, 29, is a St. John’s County firefighter/EMT who started drumming at The Castillo de San Marcos, a fort in St. Augustine, when he was 16. His eighth grade history teacher got him into Civil War reenacting, and now focuses primarily on the Spanish Colonial periods of the 16th-18th centuries. With his sallet helmet and visor, the pauldron (shoulder pieces) with discs and gorget (neck piece), he is dressed like a Spanish Conquistador who would have accompanied Ponce De Leon in 1513. His gear weighs about 65 lbs. He thinks it may be heavier and more awkward than the gear he wears as a firefighter. “What blows my mind is how these men had to wear all of this armor for days on end. I only have to wear it for hours at a time.”

Marc Sala, 19, grew up in St. Augustine and joined the Men of Menendez reenactment group in the eight grade. “It was better than the Boy Scouts,” he said, “but other kids thought it was lame because sometimes you have to wear tights.” His mom sewed his clothes, and he got a gun and sword for this 16th birthday and now as a serious hobbyist spends hours reenacting. “The best part about reenacting is when the park closes at 5 pm and you get to live it, and sit around and talk shop and history and geek out about cod pieces and shoes with the other guys.” Sala works at an ice cream store to support his hobby is going to paramedic school and is planning on joining the Navy Reserves and would love to be a Search and Rescue Hospital Corpsman.

Two years ago, Bruce Harris, 58, retired from The Fort, otherwise known as The Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, where he ran their bookstore. His favorite period is the discovery period of founding history, “It’s a sickness, once you get into it you can’t stop,” but he notes the Spanish Colonial reenactors aren’t really that bad. “The guys in Civil War history are nuts,” he jokes. His favorite thing to tell tourists is that the first sight of St. Augustine the Spanish had was there in a a field at The Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park. This is what the Europeans saw when they landed here, and that’s pretty neat.”

Playing the part of a compañeros, who would have formed a defensive shield wall, Chad Light, 46, is a doctoral history student at the University of Florida who has been a full-time reenactor for the last 4 years. His earliest memory is going to events about colonial America with his dad, a history professor at The College of William & Mary. Light said one thing he loves stressing to people is that “Christopher Columbus did not discover America and Ponce de Leon did not discover America. There were already people living here. This was a military business enterprise given a license by the king. When Ponce landed here they knew they did not come to discover it, but to claim it for Spain.”

After looking through the last few years worth of work, for a talk in Ohio, what I want to tell people is that photography is a love affair. I just think the work that still resonates with me is when it’s obvious that I fell in love with the person or place.

I’m going through the archives for two upcoming talks I’ll be giving and a possible website overhaul sometime in the near future. Sometimes old photos have a way of sneaking back up on you. Out of context it takes on a whole new meaning.

This is what the Python Challenge looked like. And this is what covering the Python Challenge looked like for writer Michael Kruse.

Just a tenth of a mile in, the trail disappeared, swallowed up by the previous night’s rain. Making the Florida Scenic Trail more of a scenic lake, the trail being impassible, we turned back. Kruse kept his notebook dry, while his new boots sopped up all that muck and the cold water soaking the pants provided a shock.

A stop at Lucky Cole’s, tucked way back in the heart of Loop Road, provided a much needed break — a beer and an Everglades bath.

Tweeting on his iPhone, by the light of the camp fire, Kruse was able to get some astute observations and insights out. Glad this tweet made the story: You know what a mob in the Everglades looks like? Nothing. The Everglades makes mobs disappear. This one, too: The trouble with just about everywhere is it’s the same thing as just about anywhere.

For our last column, John Woodrow Cox and I explored the world of Sun City Center, Fla. But rather than give you the cliché, golden oldie, we wanted to give the readers something they weren’t expecting. John and I met Diamond Jim, and immediately knew he’d be perfect. His honesty and candor about being one of the most eligible bachelors in the retirement mecca were refreshing. And in Sun City, where women out number men 16:1, Diamond Jim has the odds stacked against him because he likes his ladies younger.

Still I was surprised it got the reaction it did, and incredibly please with how our editor chose to handle it.

John’s 467 masterful words are below:

SUN CITY CENTER — He reached for a round brush next to a green box of Polident. The bristles glided through his fading, feathery blond hair. From his medicine cabinet, beneath a shelf of pill bottles for blood pressure and cholesterol, he plucked a glass jar of 212 Sexy Men cologne. Nine puffs draped him in a bouquet of vanilla, mandarin and self-assurance. He stood before his bathroom mirror at the threshold of another night out, a voyage of mischievous one-liners and kisses on cheeks and, perhaps, a woman to bring home to the “playpen.”

“Diamond Jim” Kopernick is approaching 70 and among Sun City Center’s most eligible single men. The former printers union president in New York has an accent that’s pure Yonkers. He once stood 5 feet 8, but time has reclaimed an inch. He has light blue eyes that wink at anything with curves. In 2009, he was Mr. January and sported a white tuxedo in the town’s inaugural Senior Bachelor Calendar. He sold at auction for $275.

He has been divorced and single for three decades. He wonders what his parents would think of him now. They were married for 57 years. He knows they were in love, and he knows he never has been. He has yet to cry over a woman. His ex-wife once told him he would die a lonely old man. Maybe, but he doubts it.

The census says single women in this town outnumber single men 3-1, but some insist it’s much more lopsided. Soon after a man’s wife dies, so the legend goes, members of the “casserole brigade” often appear at his door bearing warm meals and wide smiles. But in Diamond Jim’s eyes, the man in the bathroom mirror stopped growing old years ago, as did the lady he imagines on his arm. He hasn’t found her yet — that voluptuous woman under 50, who wants him and not his money. But he thinks that one night he’ll bump into her and say the right thing and live happily thereafter.

Jim looked for her on that recent evening. He was primed. Diamonds on his fingers, gold around his neck, reading glasses in his pocket. He took the Jeep instead of his apple red 1988 Mercedes 560SL convertible, the “cat mobile.” He made his way to a bar stool down the road. He sipped a Manhattan and invited a petite, dark-haired woman to his place for steamed snow crab and a cocktail. He went home, cooked and waited. He never warmed up the hot tub or played the Oscar Peterson CD. The candles next to his bed went unlit. The bottle of eucalyptus spearmint massage oil remained capped. He fell asleep in his living room chair. She didn’t call.

“There’s always another day,” he said later. “Never say never.”