All my life i have loved looking a photographs. When my friends were getting baseball gloves and robots for Christmas (this was the pre-video gamer area), i would unwrap picture books about animals, outer space, war and far off peoples in far away lands. The words never interested me much, it was the images and it was this love i have for the image that led me through college. Now as an upstart photojournalist with no training, i drew upon my memory of the photographs i loved in national geographic and in all the books i collected to shape the way i would take photographs for my newspaper. Certainly it would be easier to take interesting photographs of a battle torn village or starving children in Africa but, i was determined to find the extraordinary in the everyday all around me.

I began to look. I began to see everything around me. Were as in college, photographs were carefully constructed with light and lines and color, now i had to let life construct the art.

Most of my assignment for the fronts were (and still are) about event coverage. An elementary school receives the gift of a new American flag that replaces the old tattered one which has flown outside the school for over a decade. This scene takes place repeatedly all over the country every day. The faces are different. The name of the school is never the same. Where is the photograph?

I reasoned that capturing an image of faces unique to my town was not enough reason to make 20,000 people look at the image the next morning. What makes an image more than the sum of the parts which comprise the image? A decorated veteran hands over a folded American flag to the principal of a school as hundreds of small children gather around them to watch. Is it enough to show the event, or is there an "EVENT" tucked away within the event?

I snapped a few shots of the presentation, but i knew that there must be more.

Finally, my eyes came to rest on a single child standing and saluting the flag as it was rising on the flagpole. It was quick and sudden and lasted for only a moment. The MOMENT.

The next day we got plenty of positive calls about the image. It seems that i was the only one to see it actually happen. The "moment" is what i have been looking for ever since. Some days are more successful than others, but i will never stop trying. That's what i do....i collect moments.