I recently did my first international assignment. It was for the Harvard Business Manager, which is the German version and a sister to, the Harvard Business Review. I actually thought it was somebody playing a joke on me when a woman named Heidi called my cell phone from Hamburg, Germany. It was odd that her number showed up on the caller i.d. with no dashes between the numbers. They needed an environmental portrait of Joe LaBianca, an associate professor for Management and International Center for Research on Social Networks in Business at the University of Kentucky. It turned out to be a good shoot with Joe and one of his doctoral classes, who were in the middle of a social networking research project that had received quite a bit of national and international attention. Here is what I shot, and here is what they used.

I had a chance last Sunday to cover Powell County’s basketball team and my cousin Austin Monnett, who is a point guard on the team. They played Bracken County on the floor at Rupp Arena. It was a really good game that went back forth until the final seconds. It’s always fun for me to photograph Powell County because that’s where I first learned to shoot basketball for our high school newspaper, The Pirate Press, and the yearbook my senior year, 1987-1988. Back then I used to shoot from the stands because I was too nervous and embarrassed to go sit on the floor like I was supposed to.

Doing things like this reminds me of my age, when I look into the stands and see the parents with their cam corders cheering for sons. These parents were people that I went to school with and played baseball with. I remember our parents doing the same thing at our ball games back in the 80s. I used to go to Morehead and watch Austin’s uncle Alex, who was also #11, play in the 16th Region. It’s funny how it all comes full circle.

If Nolan is my hunter, then Cameron is my athlete. Cameron loves to go to ball games with me. He went with me Sunday and had some great conversations with Austin’s Daddy Roy. The doctor expects to have Roy’s left ear sewn back on any day now.

Here  a few shots of my favorite landmarks in the snow. The first is the Ivyton School House in Magoffin County. It’s an old school that was built with WPA money in 1938 during The Great Depression. It was used as a school until it eventually burned, leaving only the skeleton of its rock walls in the 1990s.

One of my other favorite landmarks is the little wooden boat dock that sits on Lake Ellerslie, which is located across from Jacobson Park on Richmond Road in Lexington. I was driving into Lexington early this morning and the fog coming off the water was lit up like a Christmas tree by the early morning sun. It was one of those occasions where I passed it up at first, thinking it was too cold to get out of the car. Then I reminded myself as I turned around to go back that great photos seldom happen during ideal weather.