How to Photograph School Facilities

One of the first times that I realized I had a unique skill set to give to a school was when we built a new school at the site of my current school, which had a long and storied history, and was oozing with tradition. For our journalism program to cover the construction, we couldn't allow students to be in a construction zone due to liability issues.

While understandable, it presented a challenge. To meet that, I was asked to take photographs of the process. It was a two year process and over time, as I linked to photos on my site from my trips to the new building, a lot of eyeballs saw my photos. At the peak of traffic, in one month, my photos had over 100,000 photo views. That was one moment when I realized what I unique experience I was getting.

The other moment came when I photographed our Friday night football game from atop the soon to be demolished gym across the street. As the story goes, I was perched atop the gym with my tripod and camera, and as the national anthem played and all eyes were turned in the flag's direction, right in line of sight with the gym, people began to worry, as they told security they thought I was a sniper! A sniper I was not, but with the word carrying around the bleachers, I got noticed to say the least.

A few days later, when I released my photo I had taken, it caught fire and went "local viral". It became the must have photo. To date, it is by far my most commonly violated copyright image I have, as so many people took the image illegally. I did sell it quite a few times and it has been auctioned for a hefty price as well. I later learned that it was seen by kids all over the Twitter-verse.