[X]PRESSPHOTO

Photo by Julia Robinson

A photographer is always on the hunt for three elements: light, composition, moment. The zen underpinning of photojournalism is that you can’t control all the elements all the time. Even after you’ve mastered the craft you need good instincts, divine inspiration or luck to get the photo. You might have heard a photographer refer to the Light Gods or hear their awed intake of breath when they see a Decisive Moment in print.

Sometimes you work hard for the frame and sometimes you’re given a gift. That collection of gifts is your vision. It’s what you are open to seeing and the often-unpredictable way the world has of spicing it up. Sometimes you’re ready for it and sometimes you go home with a handful of what if’s.

At the Dia de los Muertos parade in San Francisco, I was surrounded by spinning Aztec dancers with full headdresses and jingle bell anklets. I spent most of my time, 200+ frames, trying to capture their movement and the emotion of the dance with slow shutter, rear-curtain flash combinations. At the end of the night it was this lone frame that survived the edit. One quiet moment in the melee.

Photo by Justin Mott

The following is an excerpt from my travel diary on a recent three-month trip I took to Cambodia and Vietnam:

Recently I’ve been working on a project with the help of Tri translating. I met a family in the river community along the Red River. I’ve been spending a lot of time with this family documenting their lifestyle. They are a family of 5, mom, dad, two boys and a girl. The brothers are ten years old and the little girl is 6. They attend a charity school because they can’t afford the $60 per year for public school. The dad works unloading bananas for about 20,000dong a ton (around $1per hour) and the mom sells crab noodle soup on the sidewalk. The family has opened up its home to me, which I almost sink every time I walk along the three-plank bamboo dock and onto the 15ft one-room wooden riverboat. I’ve posted some of the pictures on the clubs website and many of the guys want to join me to do a story on the family. The other day was a little out of control with five photographers tagging along with Tri and I to visit the family. I don’t want to overwhelm them, plus I can’t take picture inside there tiny home anymore without one of the photographers ending up in my frame, never mind we’re going to sink the boat. The father is a very stern man and for a few days I was little uneasy shooting him but he finally showed his smile and is slowly opening up, it’s a shame I’m leaving.

This moment was captured after a week of shooting in the cloudy weather the sun finally appeared. From my two weeks by the river I had never seen anyone swim in the murky water until this day. Nam, pictured in this frame, took off all his clothes and jumped into the water and his sister followed suit. The children played in the water for a while and the moment just reminded of the essence of being a child, no matter what condition one lives in.

Photo by Jason Fritz

Everyday, Alejandro rose well before the sun did. Just twelve years old, he had already been working in the Mercado in the hardscrabble El Tepe neighborhood, in Querétaro, México, stacking crates of fruits and stocking the vegetable stalls for some years.

While attending school is obligatory in México, the reality for many children like Alejandro in the neighborhood is one of working - from a very young age - to provide for their families.

The kids of El Tepe can been seen in the city's markets and major intersections, where they weave in-and-out of traffic, squeegeeing the windshields of sympathetic bus drivers and passing motorists, who hand over a pocket full of change for their efforts.

Yet, even after a long day of work, the hunger for learning lead some of the children of this poor district to come of their own accord to a neighborhood after-work program designed educate children who, because of economic realities, were unable to attend formal school.

I spent many days with this amazing group of kids. My limited Spanish vocabulary wasn't a problem, as the kids would come to me to see if their long division problems were correct. They seemed to get a kick out of it when I said that I needed a calculator first. I was only half kidding. Towards the end of each session, I received lessons from the children on the latest in Spanish slang, or words in Otomi, an indigenous language that many of the children spoke. In turn, I would teach them the words in English, or the best of English slang, whichever they preferred.

After a few hours of studying, and the day's light waning, it was time to play. Chaotic soccer games in the streets just outside the market were the norm. Sometimes, play took the form of epic food-fights with the mercado's unsellable fruits and vegetables being hurled about. And on one particular day, the kids raided the lumberyard across the way for scraps of wood to play with.

Most of the kids never left the neighborhood, only experiencing the world inside El Tepe's boundaries.

Sometimes, however, with the right scrap of wood as a prop, and a little imagination, it seemed as if they just might fly away.

Photo by Chris Girard

I learned from a protest sign that SF State's student union is named after the founder of the United Farm Workers. I directly felt partial to a condonable cause against underpaid grape picking. That's not to say that everyone who is opposed to better conditions for vineyard workers are unreasonable winos. (Cha-ching). I respect every offbeat protest whether righteously disruptive or brazenly irrational. Thanks to you, Cesar Chavez. If only every idealistic middle-ager who ever gets tired of following protests or marches helps incite at least three street-stoppers themselves...