Maria is getting a new hip. Sure, we all probably know someone who has hip replacement surgery, your grandfather, grandmother, the occasional pro athlete who took too many hits on the field, but Maria is only 23 years-old.

It’s not apparent how she lost the use of her right hip, an accident or perhaps a viral infection of some kind, but in the tiny village in Peru where she lives, she never got to play soccer with her friends, or even help her family in chores.

Just trying to relieve herself is a difficult and humiliating experience.

Maria is the oldest of 50-60 children that will be treated by the medical team led by Dr. David Shaw and his team of 18 surgeons, orthotic and prosthetic specialists, physical therapists, and nurses through the One Child at a Time and Capital City Medical Teams mission to Cuzco, Peru that I have been invited to document. I am privileged to accompany them as they help these kids, perhaps 300 in all, with a range of need like corrective surgery for club feet, limb augmentation, prosthetic fitting, and crutch and brace fittings. New chances for lives to be changed.

AmeriCares is providing the hip orthotic manufactured by Zimmer and instruments that will be needed for the procedure. It's really amazing to see how an operation like this comes together from all over the country to help those in need. I'm getting excited.

More to come.

The digital age and fundraising

I found out a few weeks ago that I was invited to document a medical expedition to Peru. A team of 19 doctors, surgeons, prosthetists, nurses and occupational and physical therapists are heading to the Sacred Valley of the Incas near Cuzco, Peru to help children with various orthotic and prosthetic needs. This humanitarian mission is an
incredible undertaking and I am very privileged to be invited along. They expect to help 300-400 children and and perform up to 60 surgeries during the expedition.

But, the trip takes place in five weeks, and that doesn't leave much time to raise funds.

I promised my wife I wouldn't hammer out our meager savings, especially so soon after the birth of our daughter, Stella, so I had to get creative in figuring out how to make this terrific opportunity happen.

A photographer on the forum site www.sportsshooter.com suggested a Website called kickstarter.com. This site provides the portal for people to get their passions in front of the faces and keystroking fingers of an audience interested in being a part of a realized dream, no matter how profound or outrageous. The key to the projects is that everyone gets something out of it. The dreamer gets his dream, and the investors get whatever return they are promised. In my case, depending on the amount, you can get your own photo montage, a soft cover book, or a hard cover coffee table book, or more.

I am pretty excited to try this out. Over the next few weeks, I am going to add more to my listing, hoping to get the trip covered. Already, I have about 10% of the trip up front here on kickstarter.com, and a Pro Photo Supply has generously offered to loan me equipment for the documentary. I'd say this is off to a pretty good kickstart!

A big salute to the veterans today!

Harry Trimble-Army Air Corps photo recon pilot in Luxembourg

I come from a military family. My great-great-grandfather Wiley Trimble was a confederate soldier. My dad still has his 1861 Confederate Navy Colt, my uncle has his saber. My great-grandfather Richard was calvary during the First World War. My grandfather Harry "Boppa" Trimble flew photo recon in World War II, Korea, and oversaw missions in Vietnam. He also received the Soldier's Medal for bravery when he pulled a test pilot out of a burning cockpit at Edwards Air Force Base. It's the highest honor awarded during peacetime.

My other grandfather Norm served in the Army in WW II and my uncle Les was a seaman in the Navy and survived a kamikaze attack o

n his boat. He doesn't talk about it. My uncle Keith narrowly escaped the USS Hornet when it was sunk at the Battle of Santa Cruz in 1942.

Granville Dressel, Navy Seaman on the U.S.S Franklin

My wife's grandfather Granville served on the USS Franklin, an aircraft carrier that was kamikazied in the gulf of Tokyo while carrying the famed Black Sheep Squadron. He was blown unconscious into the water where he floated for almost a day before being rescued. He passed away just last year, after finally telling his family his harrowing tale. My uncle Jack was an Air Force navigator during Vietnam. His F-4 Phantom was shot down towards the end of the war and he was a POW for several months before he was freed. My cousin Eric, Jack's son, served in the Air Force in Iraq.

Ray Selvyn of Yuma kisses his wife, Olivia, goodbye before heading to Afghanistan.

One of my closest friends, Carlos Chavez, is a veteran of Desert Storm. I have met and photographed several vets of this latest war, some of them are struggling, some of them are homeless.

Larry Deturenee, a veteran of the War in Iraq, sets up a sleep pad at St. Andrews Lutheran Church in Vancouver, WA March 30, 2008. It's the last night to sleep there for the homeless program. The next day Larry was on the streets.

Today we honor you all. Your risks, your sacrifices in body, mind, family, faith, and peace, are remembered here today. Thank you for your service.

I am a pixel Ghoul

What better word to describe me? I just launched my first art gallery showing this past week called "Gravelights." at the Northbank gallery in Vancouver, WA. The project came about from a trip to New England to visit my wife's family in Vermont. We went to Salem, Mass first explore around and when I saw the main graveyards in town, some of the oldest in the United States, I got inspired to play around with long exposures and painting with flashlights and colored strobes.

So after I talked my very reluctant wife to sneak into the cemetery during the Witching Hour (12am-3am, hey, ya gotta do it right in Salem y'know!) I came up with some funky, way-out-of-my-typical-style of shooting stuff!

One of my inspirations was Professor Savage, my archeology professor at ASU. He did his work on symbology on tombstones especially in the 1600s to the early 1800s. The imagery on the tombstones went from a gothic, skull with raven wings look to more angelic, cherub like symbology that demonstrated the changing attitude of the afterlife during that period.

These were just the tombstones he worked on and it was pretty cool to be out there, and be the ones that go bump in the night!

But, of all the photos I did, the ghostly lights Jenn and I created for the photos, there was one photo I didn't generate the "Spectre." This one I was doing a long exposure as a group of tourist walked by on a candle-lit tour of Salem. The wall behind them was evenly lit and I got about 5 frames. But, this frame was the only one that had the white floating form in it! Don't know what it is, but its the real deal! Enjoy!

A terrific reason why you should hire me for your next project

http://tinyurl.com/ylewz99

NSTP joins Viewfinders stock agency

Stock Photography with a Pacific Northwest Focus

A quick blog this week as I am sitting in the hospital with my beautiful wife awaiting the birth of our first baby. Viewfinders stock agency graciously offered to carry my photography in their stock base and Allison McClean who introduced me to the agency, had very kind words to say.

Check it out here: http://viewfinders-photography.blogspot.com/

Thanks Allison! I look forward to a great relationship with you guys!

Which came first, the bear or the cub?

I gravitated towards photography because I didn't have the patience to be a painter.

I tried, I grew up sketching and drawing, even made a decent living on school supplies in elementary school trading my drawings for cool football team pencils, but when it came to painting, my ADD kicked in, and I was a frustrated painter. No less frustrating was having my mom as an art teacher. She was a wildlife painter in acrylics and when we moved to the North Carolina, she shifted her talent to pottery.

Now, that would have been fine and good for some, but she missed painting, and figured out a way to combine painting with her pottery, taking nature scenes and transferring them to her dishes, vases and even basin sinks for custom home projects.

But this year,we finally teamed up. My wife and I took a babymoon trip to the Canadian Rockies in May and were just in time for the elk, rams, and bears to crowd out the scenery. I was snap happy and managed to get some fun animal pics for myself. I sent them to my folks and my mom instantly jumped on them began cranking out the clay and paint brushes. Here is the result. Enjoy.

Coastal town greens the deep blue

I shot this story in April for Edible Portland, a quarterly magazine for Ecotrust in Portland in April. Port Orford, OR is quite an amazing place, as its one of the last true small boat fishing ports left in the West Coast. When you come here to drop your boat in, its quite literal! You won't find a ramp to cozy the trailer down to the water, oh no. A crane drops and lifts that bad boy out with you in it! Pretty interesting, especially when the tide is heading out!

Port Orford has resisted the siren call of the tourism song that has repurposed other coastal towns, chock full of trendy restaurants and kitsch stores. You almost feel like you are visiting a town on a smaller scale to Gloucester, Mass, the fishing community known for its tight knit salty dogs seen in "The Perfect Storm."

The fishing community is doing something pretty amazing. Recognizing the declining numbers of prize fish such as salmon, halibut, and just about everything else, they teamed up with scientists to establish a marine habitat reserve to protect fragile breeding grounds, and preserve a source for small boat fishing to continue, establishing a social, economical and environmental triple bottom line for the community.

My only regret on this shoot is we only had a day allocated to the shoot, and weather drove out the fishing crop we wanted to focus on, black cod, or butterfish as the Canadians like to call them, so we didn't have the boat access we were hoping for. I hung out at sunrise

to get the early birds heading out and talked with some of the local fisherman about what they liked best about fishing in the port.

The beauty of this job is the amazing range of people you get to meet. If you ever get the hankering to try your hand on a fishing boat for a day, I don't think you'll find a better group of people on the west coast to educate and entertain you while you work your butt off!

Helping others avoid the temptation to go the easy path

A few days ago, a peer at a newspaper in New Jersey talked about a photo contest they were planning to sponsor with Website visitors judging the best photo of the month. He went on to say that the prize was being narrowed down to providing a family portrait to one of the voters by one of the staff photographers.

That rankled me quite a bit.

Not that there is anything wrong with doing portraits. I love them. I love the challenge of taking the simple set up and evolving it to fit the person or persons I am photographing and revealing their identity. Its necessary in this business and a daily thing for newspaper photographers. But many newspapers use it as a crutch. Its more often than not the backup photo for a story in which the action has already happened or not enough planning was implemented to get something more compelling. I mean, do you want to see the hero firefighter of the month sweating and working, DOING the thing that made him a hero, or a simple portrait of him leaning against a fire truck? I am all for the former. And with the photojournalists laboring hard to keep their jobs in today's newspaper market that crumbles around them, sometimes fighting to remind their colleagues and newspaper owners that they are journalists every bit as much as they are WITH the added skill to tell a story with a photo, series of photos or even video, is it fair to marginalize them to simply be little more than a studio portrait photographer when the day is done?

I suggested that they try a little harder to benefit their readers, and thought about what I enjoy doing when I am not snapping the shutter, and that's helping other people do a better job snapping THEIR shutters!

I can't count how many times I've been shooting on assignment, and on a lull, had people come up ask me about how to use their point and shoot cameras. I always enjoyed explaining the aperture/shutter speed/ISO relationship (and comparing it with how much squint/blink/and light sensitivity of the eye is related) and watching them "get it" and seeing that spark of enthusiasm light up in them, busily snapping away.

So who would be better than to offer up a one or two hour lesson in understanding your camera or just take better pictures yourself than the highly talented and community saturated photographers of the newspaper?

The photographer warmed immediately to the idea and I sure hope that, if they do the contest, they go with it. Its a great feeling when not producing great images myself, to help others unlock that potential in themselves.

Wake up America, stamps for snail mail just went up two cents for first class. Add that to this list so you aren't caught unaware. Needless to say, I sent out a mess o' bills last night with the rest of our old stamps! Update today!

As far as this photo goes, believe it or not, Jenn pointed this out yesterday morning! This is not set up, we were cracking up when we saw it. Gotta love "snail mail!"

Domestic Prices

Domestic Service	Average Delivery Time	Starting Price	Pricing Factors
Express Mail®	Overnight, most locations	From $13.05	Prices based on weight and distance  Flat rate envelope available!
Priority Mail®	1 - 3 days	From $4.95	Prices based on weight and distance  Flat rate options available!
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International Prices

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Priority Mail® International	6-10 days	From $10.95	Prices based on weight and shape Flat rate options available!
First-Class Mail International™	varies	From $0.75	Prices based on weight and distance

Enlightened tulips

Scott "sees" the light, finally!

Woodburn is about 25 minutes south of Portland.

Early on in my life, I was pretty much a "make your own destiny" kind of person, and while I still believe in a lot of that, I also believe Karma plays a factor too. Lots of things worked out particularly well moving to Portland from Phoenix, and while it wasn't without bumps on the way, we believe we had good Karma. Now last year, my wife wanted to go to the Woodburn Tulip Festival to the see the highly acclaimed Holland style tulip farm. I had just gotten back from filming a movie in Arizona and felt guilty to take time off from my newspaper job at the Columbian to shoot it, so I let the narrow window to see the tulips slide shut and denied my wife the chance to see them.

                                                                                          

I felt bad about that because while I was excited to uproot and move to the lush flora of Oregon, my wife had a harder time. She grew up in the desert and her family was there, and while her adventurous spirit was stirred to move here, it was a big leap all the same, and not jumping at the chance to join in on an Oregon must see with her was downright rude of me. I mean, c'mon, who doesn't like flowers?

Jenn, the brightest flower in a sea of them!

So this year when she brought it up again, we grabbed the pups, the gear and went, and boy was it beautiful. The dogs sniffed every flower they could and Jenn looked beautiful in the cascade of color. 

We were just about done with the day there when we spotted this monk among a bed of tulips matching his robes perfectly! He was taking digital pictures and made for a great photo himself. I spent the next fifteen minutes photographing him as he proceeded along. Afterwards, I introduced myself to him and his eyes grew wide at the 300 2.8 hanging from my shoulder, so I let him look through it. I got his contact info so I could send him the pics that I took of him and he was so overjoyed to see them, he gave a blessing of good Karma to us and Jenn's baby bump due in August. 

We needed that day in the flowers and the Karma boost. I guess Jenn is right, I should listen to her more often.

Abbot Lung Pao Subin

                

This is the photo that began it all, or–to borrow freely from the Greek poet Homer–the face that launched a million clicks.

I am not going to tell you this is my best photo. It isn’t. Nor am I going to say it is even contest worthy. Not a chance. However, it IS the photo that changed the course of my life, because it was the first, and, until I clicked the shutter; until I processed the Kodachrome and threw it into a projector for friends and family to see, I was struggling to find my place in the world– As a mechanical engineer.

Pretty exciting, I know. Until then, I was like

many of you, I merely enjoyed photography as a fun escape. However, when I my camera and I encountered his little girl, I had some tough things I was dealing with in my life.

You see, from the age of six, I knew what I wanted to be: an astronaut. I was going to go to the Air Force Academy, excel in math and science, wow my instructors with my flight skills, and get in the seat of every fighter plane available to me. Then, it was off to NASA, where I would train like I never trained before and get selected to the first manned Mars mission. That was pretty much it. Major Tom, the subject of two space wandering songs, was my theme. Parts of the movie, The Right Stuff were filmed in the house my dad grew up in at Edward's Air Force Base. I came from two previous generations of pilots in the family, I could define what plane was is the air simply by hearing its engines. It was destiny.

That’s about when life happened.

My grades were top notch, my drive was focused, my interviewers love me, I had the brass ring in my sights, but, I got shot down by a flight surgeon–Amblyopia–lazy eye. No depth perception. No pilot seat.

What? I had records in high school hurdles, I was a corner back in football, what do you mean no depth perception? I can still hear the flight surgeon when he told me,”You see, Mr. Trimble, the trouble might come up in a tight formation at Mach speeds, or trying to land 30 feet above the tarmac.”

“Well,” I said in my wisecracking 18 year-old way, “isn’t that better than 30 feet below it?”

He wasn’t amused. I tried again a year later after entering UNC-Charlotte for engineering and tried again. Grounded again, and that was it.

About this time my grandparents were preparing to go on a month long trip overseas to Indonesia, Jakarta, Malaysia and Thailand. The knew how depressed I was and wanted to share the experience of their trip so they invited me along. My grand dad, a retired test pilot and photo reconnaissance pilot, fueled my passion for flying as a kid by sneaking me into the air in a Cessna against my mother’s wishes to teach me landings and takeoffs, he now had it in mind to supplant my shattered dream with something else, and it took the form of a Pentax K 1000.

In my hands, matched to the very eyes that betrayed me, I discovered a tool to vent my grief. That tool introduced me to a strange and beautiful culture. Despite knowing little about aperture, shutter speed, Rule of Thirds, I used my camera to seek out things I had never seen, filling a huge hole in me that was satiated by my new found ability.

I wandered into villages in Malaysia and spoke with the villagers while they were washing their laundry in the river. I photographed a barber giving a beard trim in the doorway of his shop in Singapore’s Muslim district, and in Bali, I met a girl selling bananas.

I was walking down from a temple with my grandmother when this tiny child was standing in the pathway spinning around whispering over and over again “one dollar” to tourists as they passed. I smiled and said hello and kept walking when the image of her eyes as she held the bananas to her face stuck with me as we walked away. I spun around and held her in the cross hairs as she turned towards me and clicked. It was as if something magical literally guided my arms and possessed me. I walked away imagining how great I hoped the photo would be. It would be eight weeks later when I would be back home and eight boxes of magic slides would arrive from the developer.

The thing I heard most from those who looked at the images, especially the image of the little banana girl was “You should work for National Geographic!” That was it. Suddenly, everything started to click. The right

side of my brain buzzed with creative possibilities, the logical left side let go of its dominance. A semester went by, and my hard science engineering degree fell away and I transferred to Arizona State to pursue photojournalism.

I have shot several amazing photos over the last 20 years since that magical tropical adventure. I traveled to several parts of the world, and experienced many touching stories through my camera and the skills I built to amaze those who viewed them, but nothing like taking that photo. That untempered, electric feeling that happened when I saw beyond the subject of just that girl, and saw the life happening in her eyes and acted to capture it.

Like I said, it wasn’t my best photo. I could probably list 15 things that would keep it from winning a contest, but to me, It holds a top spot in my life. It made me a photographer.