I had one of my photos from the Alaska state high school football championships published on ESPN.com. Here is the link.

Going way back to when she was just someone who substituted for vacationing hosts on Air America Radio, I have been a longtime fan of Rachel Maddow. Now, not only does she have her own show on Air America Radio, she has an increasingly popular and influential show on MSNBC. For example, last week she had the second-rated nightly news program for her time slot in the daily Nielson ratings, beating out Larry King Live. And she has only had her own show on MSNBC for a few months. One of the vestiges of her radio show she has maintained on the MSNBC show is her segments where she explores popular culture with Kent Jones; or, more accurately, she learns what she can from Kent about popular culture so she can carry on conversations at cocktail parties about something other than foreign policy, domestic issues, public policy, government, politics …. well, you get the idea. As she says, he tells her just what she needs to know so she can go out in public.

Anyway, if you follow my blog, you would have read about the human Obama logo that Alaska Women for Obama organized a little while ago. The story about that day has now made its way to the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC as part of her Kent Jones segment. Watch the video.

Late in the morning today, a group of around 350-400 Obama supporters gathered on the Delaney Park Strip with a seemingly impossible mission: to come together to create the visual of the Obama logo and the United States flag.  What started as an idea only a week ago came to fruition, based on what seemed to be about 40% planning, 40% insipiration and 20% winging-it.  The organizers had a good idea of what they wanted to do, and had staked out the outer corners or plot points for both the logo and the flag.  Coordinating from the third floor room of a hotel across the street, a handful of Obama staff and volunteers corralled this group of volunteers into place to form the logo.  More amazingly, they coordinated a mass exodus from the spot, only to return again and run almost perfectly back into place.

Add to the fact that the air was chilly, and it had taken forty minutes to perform the previous maneuver, which was to create a representation of the United States flag.  But everyone present had a belief in the power of what they were doing.  They came together with a common goal to create something that in and of itself did not produce anything tangible.  It did not raise money, it did not gain publicity (no local media was there other than a photographer from the Anchorage Daily News), and it did not change any minds.  But these people were energized, excited and inspired.  They had fun, driven by a sense of hope and wonder, and faith that they were merely a small microcosm of power represented in a movement sweeping this country.  I thought later as I was processing the photos that while there have been several pro-Obama rallies with hundreds, even thousands, of enthusiastic Obama supporters, I have not seen one pro-McCain rally in Alaska.  Sure, there have been a couple lightly attended and access-restricted pro-Palin rallies, but she is not the G.O.P. presidential candidate – though don’t tell her that.  No surprise over the lack of visible support for McCain in Alaska – he did only finish fifth in the Republican primary here in February.

For Doug Burns’ photo diary and narrative on the event, visit his piece on The Daily Kos.  You can also read the Anchorage Daily News coverage here.

This image will be appearing in the Winter membership newsletter for The Wilderness Society. It just so happens that the image they selected is also my February 2008 Print of the Month.

I also just completed an interview with the editor of South Dakota magazine to accompany a photo portfolio of winter images from Badlands National Park that will appear in the January/February issue of the magazine. To preview some of the images that will appear in the piece, visit my Badlands National Park gallery on my Printroom site.

John Turbett, a freelance videographer working for the Anthony Robbins Companies, gets up close and personal with one of the black bears at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center.  Many photographers often dread working with videographers as the creative visions can sometimes collide.  I found working with John to be quite the opposite: he and I often had the same ideas at about the same time, and worked well in keeping out of eachother’s way.

It has been labeled by national media as the first high school football game of the 2008 season. The match – the visiting Palmer High School Moose against the home team South Anchorage High School Wolverines. I have always been intrigued by the media’s need to label things. The label is so important, whether it is true is immaterial. For example, this game actually started at 7:05 p.m. However, the Soldotna High School Stars hosted the Nikiski High School Bulldogs at 6:00 p.m., over an hour earlier. Perhaps the national media draws a line between what Alaska calls the 4A (largest) schools and smaller schools, like the 3A class that Soldotna and Nikiski belong to. If that is the case, then there should be a qualifier to the label of “First High School Football Game of the Season.” As a photographer who is a member of several professional photography associations, one of the things that is really drilled into me is the importance of truth in captioning. If I am going to publish a composite photo, I should identify it as such. If I take a photo of a game farm wolf, it is unethical for me to identify it as a wild wolf. It seems to me that this labeling issue is merely a small symptom of a broader problem of the media playing fast and loose with ethical rules in order to generate interest in a subject or story.