Take My Picture

This post has little to do with journalism, but it is a fun story and this is my blog, so here it is.

Some of the most memorable incidents that have happened to me in photojournalism have nothing to do with reporting or photography.

Many years ago I was covering the Moritz Basketball Classic and dozens of high school teams were converging on all the gyms of an area campus. A typical occurrence when you are carrying a bigass camera in a school is to hear “Hey, take my picture!” from some of the little kids. I usually at least quickly pretend to take a picture so as to not disappoint the youngsters, but one round face kid with a big grin kept showing up wherever I went that day. I believe he was the son of one of the volunteers because when I went from the high school gyms to the middle school gyms a few blocks away he would be there playing in the lobby or laying upside-down in the bleachers, “Hey man, take my picture!” It got to be a joke all day to see who could say it first.

When I had to do other stories on the campuses I would occasionally see him in middle school and later in high school and we would give each other a smile and a “Hey! Take my picture!” as we saw each other. I did not know his name and it was just “Hey! Take my picture!” for years.

Fast forward more years and I am getting out of my truck at a store and I hear this deep voice, “Hey, man. Take my picture,” behind me. I turned around to see this same round face leaning out the window of a pickup. It was Dan Pennington, the “Hey, man!” kid. We talked for a while about work he was doing with area kids and it sounded interesting enough to finally take his picture and do a story about him in the paper.



Hey, Dan. Take our picture!

Fast-forward even more years to last week. I was hanging out on a couch in a church and I hear (drum roll) “Hey man…..” Yes, it is Dan Pennington again, and he attends the church where I work (cue spooky music and fade to black).