As much as I love photographing children in graveyards and people dancing, there is a special place in my heart for skate parks. It has always been my fallback when I really need to find a picture quick, and frankly skate parks are the last real place groups of teenagers go to hang out and actually do something. Drive-in’s are gone, business-owners don’t want the trouble. Anyway, you can expect an update soon on a piece I’m doing on a local skate park that is having its 10-year anniverary. For now, here’s a shot from a local park that was taken this summer.

So as you can tell from the dates on this blog, I’m playing a bit of catch up. I hope you won’t mind, but I shot this photo during Hamilton’s Independence Day celebration. The stark contrast of children and cemeteries has always been powerful to me. The imagery suggests both the enduring quality of life, as people die more are born, and temporary nature of our existence on our planet. The idea of this seeming paradox cannot be fully explored in a photo, but I still like to try.

It seems that my predictions about me lagging behind on this blog have almost come true, and yet, here I sit. I’m arising from the ashes like a phoenix. So here’s the story for the week: over the scanner waves we heard news of a person who had driven their car into a bank. Hoping for a modern day Jesse James in action, I sped to the scene. By the way, if you know that all of the police are in a specific place, you can count on not getting busted for speeding. The woman in the photo is examining the damage that her car caused. The police reported that she first said her brakes went out, then she said that she thought she was going through the drive-thru. The police found out she was diabetic. They also found three empty containers of non-alcoholic beer in her car. You can’t make this stuff up.