On a shoot with Dave Aronberg

This is me on a shoot down in Florida. You see a man standing in front of a flag. I see my preferred shirt for a shoot (Brooks Brothers Oxford Cloth with pens and a script in my pocket), a ring and a belt I got in Guatemala, the flag that I brought with me from Tennessee and our candidate at the time, Dave Aronberg, sitting behind me and looking at his Blackberry while I talk to the crew. It was a hot day near West Palm Beach.

Politics has never stopped being about expression for me. I’m never happier than when I have a camera around my neck or when we’ve gathered a crew together for a shoot. This is where art meets science … politics.

Congressman Marc Veasey. Election Night 2014.

State Rep. John Ray Clemmons. Hockey Night.

Judge Melissa Blackburn.

State Rep. Darren Jernigan.

Ben Chandler. Kentucky.

I didn’t realize it at the time but this represents a win … and a failure. Real pros are never in the photos. I can be forgiven because this was the first congressional race I ever worked. Bart Gordon in 1984.

This is something that Charles Halloran said after we worked two election cycles together … first on the Childers Congressional race in Mississippi where we elected a Democrat there for the first time in a half century … then in Florida where we beat an incumbent congressman in a race that ended up on the cover of Time and Newsweek in the same week.