Face it guys.  You wanna drive the Zamboni.  You know you do.  Just ask the Gear Daddies.

I took this photo at a Sioux Falls Stampede hockey game three or four years ago at the Sioux Falls Arena.

And yes, I too wanna drive the Zamboni. 

 

 Don't panic!

This is not an out of control fire but a controlled burn of the old grain elevator in Harrisburg a couple summers ago.  It was one of the biggest deals to hit the Garden Spot of Lincoln County in many years.  It turned into a major fire fighting exercise for the region's fire fighters.  Plus, it was really cool to watch.   I kept yelling "fire, fire, huh, huh, fire" like Beavis and Butthead.

 

Hopefully, scenes like this are done for a while in South Dakota.  I took this photo out my front door of snow piled on our flag pole about four or five years ago.  It's not often that the snow just comes down without blowing around here in Dakota.

 

This is the rare photo that I did not take.  It was taken by the folks from Kodak during a promotion they were doing at Mt. Rushmore in June 2002.  While I look like a typical touristy dork, I like the family pose and Mt. Rushmore behind us.  We were in Rapid City for the state soccer tournament.  It

is a memory of a good time with my family.

  

This is a photo of my daughter Sarah (right) and her friend Tia from the summer of 2002 at Wall Drug in Wall, SD.  I like their mischievous looks and stcking their tongues out at me.  The girls would have been about 12 at the time and acting, well, like kids.

I've included this photo for a couple of reasons.  First, it is obviously of the Great Wall of China north of Beijing, which I visited in the summer of 1983.  What is interesting is all the people walking along the wall.  The photo itself is merely ok at best--over exposed, washed out, and a bad, bald sky that didn't help matters. 

Oh, and I opened my camera back, exposing my slide film to daylight.  Pretty dumb, considering at the time I figured I'd probably not make it back to the Great Wall anytime soon--which has been the case. The original slide is nearly white from overexposure.   

Which brings me to my second point.  Thanks to the even rather rudimentary tools in Photoshop Elements 2.0 that I use, I was able to rescue the photo over twenty years later so it is actually viewable.  In the hands of a professional like my freind Dawnne Gee, he might even be able to make it better still (and a better still).  Thank goodness for digital photography!

 

This is a photo I took several years ago during a U8 or U10 soccer tournament in Sioux Falls.  That is Andrew McCuen at keeper, who is a tremendous athlete I have coached over the years and who is currently on my son Matt's U12 Davita rec team that I also coach.  I love the look of determination on his face.

 

I wish I could tell you I meant for this photo to turn out this way, but that would not be the truth.  Typically in my sports photography, I'm trying to stop the action as sharply as possible, not blur it.  I get enough unintentional blur as it is from poorly lit gyms and too weak of a flash unit on my camera.

But I think in this photo, the blur works pretty well.  My daughter Sarah, the maroon gal in the middle, is mostly stopped and waiting to receive the just thrown basketball from an unseen teammate.  Meanwhile, the other players swirl around her playing defense.  I think it captures the critical moment of the ball being thrown and the controlled chaos that is basketball.  I believe I took the photo in 2005 and it is of a C game between Harrisburg and Sioux Falls Christian.   

 

 

This is a street scene in Damascus, Syria that I took in November 2003.  I like the modern advertisement that seemingly looks down on the tricycle fruit cart.  Just a nice juxtaposition of old in new that you often find in the Middle East.

 

Believe it or not, this is a modern take on a traditional Chinese art form--ok, well, sort of.  Trees, mountains, and fog are major elements in ancient Chinese painting.  I took this photo in Huang Shan (Yellow Mountains) in south central China in the summer of 1983.  I was on a trail composed of stone steps cut through miles and miles of mountains and bamboo forest.  It was always foggy and if it wasn't foggy it was raining.  You'll note the power lines in the lower right of the photo, something the Chinese masters would not have seen back in The Day.