Saturday after the viewing of the World Cup Soccer matches on Dupont Circle (See post in On Assignment), I stayed in the city for the annual parade that is held during the Capitol Pride Festival. This was interesting and a lot of fun. Thousands of spectators lined the parade route that marched up P street and around Dupont Circle.

There was a huge “variety” of floats and bands and to my surprise, politicians. The first 20 minutes of the parade was politicians passing out literature to get the LGBT vote in the city. I think politicians should be banned from parades but from the organizer standpoint it is probably hard to do without the $500.00 per entry for elected officials and candidates. I can guarantee that nobody in the crowd came out to see them. I did shoot Mayor Fenty at the beginning, but that was my extent of my interest in them.

The crowds were appreciative of the parade participants and everyone seemed to have a great time. Here are some of the photos from the event.

My wife, Jenny, and I made a trip to Pittsburgh recently so she could attend a conference for her job. I decided to spend some time in the Strip District and see if I could make some interesting images. Now before everyone starts smirking, I need to say that the Strip District is a clothing REQUIRED area of the city. The Strip is a one-half square mile area of land just north of the city that is a historic market district with many ethnic food purveyors, art studios, antique dealers, unique boutiques and produce, seafood and ethnic food wholesalers.

Unfortunately we were not there over a Friday or Saturday night, when the area comes alive with nightlife, and the weather was not really cooperating either. Here are a few of the images from the trip.

I just finished covering the Memorial Day weekend in Washington, D.C. There is always a lot going on in the Nation’s Capital during this holiday.

But is it actually a holiday?

We do get a day off from work like any other holiday. People all over the country spend the day at picnics or at the beach. Many pools open for the summer over the Memorial Day weekend. There is a concert at the Capitol. For many is seems it is simply a long weekend of beach and beer and cookouts and concerts.

But if you hang out at any of the war memorials in D.C. or head over to Arlington National Cemetery it becomes evident quickly that for a large portion of the population, it is something much more. I stopped to think about it myself after reading “This Memorial Day, honoring a military that’s in isolation” by Washington Post Op-Ed columnist E.J. Dionne. He asks why every Memorial Day, a holiday set aside for honoring our war dead has become an occasion for beach-going, barbecues and baseball?

Anyway, it is hard to think about the beach or picnics when going to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to cover the candlelight vigil on Friday or the Rolling Thunder Ride to the Wall on Sunday. It is even harder on Memorial Day when covering families and friends of those who lost their lives in our wars as they walk through the hundreds of thousands of headstones at Arlington.

Here are some of what I think are by best images from the weekend. And just like Vice President Joe Biden was telling mothers and fathers of fallen soldiers that he was honored to meet them, but he wished it was not in a cemetery; I wish I was not pleased about these images.

Photographers have their places marked at 8:30 for a 10:00 hearing. These are just for the shot when the panel arrives at the table. When the gavel falls, everyone must take up their positions below the Senators.

The Goldman Sachs Hearings on Capitol Hill

The evidence.

8:30 a.m. Arrived early for a 10:00 hearing. There are already 15 or 20 photographers and a slew of writers and TV already in the room. Thankfully it is a bigger room than the one that held the Toyota hearings a few months back. First thing is to get laptop space set up and stake out a spot in front of the table for the first images if the witnesses as they arrive and settle in.

9:00 a.m. The waiting begins as photographers mingle and make small talk. I make a few images of the stack of exhibits before they are passed out to the Senator’s positions. There is a lot of talk about how this is going to be a long day. There are 3 panels of witnesses. The first has 4 executives that either work for or did work for Goldman Sachs, including whiz kid Fabrice Tourre who, as Dana Milbank of The Post says, “is fast becoming the poster boy of the financial crisis, a Michael Milken for the current times.” The SEC recently filed fraud charges against Goldman Sachs and the 31-year-old Frenchman who calls himself Fabulous Fab. The second panel has the CFO and the Chief Risk Officer. The final panel has the money shot: Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

9:45 a.m. I am in the middle of 30 or so photographers waiting for the first panel to arrive. I ask Melina Mara from The Washington Post if she thinks this initial scrum is worth it. Does anyone ever get a great photo from this ritual? She says it is normally hit or miss. You just have to be ready in case something happens. What that is, I am not sure.

9:50 a.m. I am feeling impatient and unconvinced. Besides, everyone will have whatever shot I get just from a different angle. So I decide to take the advice of many a great old photographer. “If all the photographers are in one place, go someplace else.” It also dawned on me that we, the photographers, were the picture. If this was the CEO I might feel differently, but this was a panel of 4 executives that either work or did work for Goldman Sachs. I extracted myself from the crowd to look for a better vantage point of the whole scene.

As I got out of the crowd, I noticed that 4 protesters had shown up at the back of the hearing room dressed in convict clothes and carrying signs. I moved in and was one of only about 3 or 4 of the group that did since the rest did not want to lose their positions at the table. Already I have a photo that most who are there do not. Cool.

10:00 a.m. The first panel arrives and I get the shots of the mass of photographers enveloping the 4 witnesses.

10:02 a.m. The gavel falls and we take our places for the opening statements by the committee chair and the swearing in of the panel.

10:46 a.m. Now, just to give an idea of how long this could go, we finally get past opening statements from the Senators and we are to the swearing in of the first panel. Of course I spent most of this time working up the first photos and transmitting to both ZUMA Press and my Photoshelter archive. One of the things I like most about Adobe Lightroom is that I can do two different exports at the same time and then do two uploads at the same time from Lightroom while I walk away and return to shooting.

I shoot the swearing in and return to the workspace to transmit that photo.

11:00 a.m. – 3:25 p.m. Yes you are reading that correctly. FOUR AND A HALF HOURS of questions and not too many answers from the FIRST PANEL! That is over four hours of shooting. I am trying hard to anticipate good reaction or facial expressions. I shoot for a while and then transmit. Then back to shooting.

We get to move around a bit during the testimony, which is good. It gives the opportunity to try for unique (as they can be) angles and work to clean up backgrounds.

The problem is that as tedious as this can be, you hate to leave since you never know when there may be a heated exchange between a frustrated Senator and a witness who is tip-toeing around a question. Which happened almost every 5 minutes with the first panel.

There were times when I was sure that Senator Levin was going to blow a gasket. It was particularly fun to hear the Senator use the word “shit” so many times in a hearing. He was quoting the Goldman Sachs email transcripts that said things like: “Look what your sales team was saying about Timberwolf: ‘Boy, that Timberwolf was one shitty deal,’ ” Levin quoted. “They sold that shitty deal. . . . How much of that shitty deal did you sell to your clients?”

3:25 p.m. As I said, you hate to leave, but at about 3:10 I needed food. So I took a quick break for lunch and of course when I returned I found that the first panel was done and I was about to miss the swearing in of the second panel. I managed to make a quick frame or two from behind the two witnesses as they gave their “I dos.”

This panel was not very exciting, but it did go by faster. It was becoming obvious that the Senators were getting more and more frustrated by the semantics and the non-answers as well as the answers they did get from the witnesses. The day was getting longer and longer and we still had the main event to come. The Goldman CEO.

There was a short recess in the action when the Senators needed to leave for a vote on the Senate Floor. This provided another opportunity to get something a bit different. The Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer, David Viniar, was consulting with his legal team and the protesters came up as close as they could from the back of the room and filled in the background for a good frame.

5:00 p.m. As the session with the second panel was winding down, the Goldman Sachs’ CEO enters the hearing room with his entourage. Of course the photographers want to get photos of him but it was a bit surreal in a way since the hearing was still going on and all the photographers just herded over to where he was sitting. The Senators never missed a beat, and kept on asking questions through what was obviously a bit of a distraction.

5:17 p.m. The main event has arrived. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein is sworn in and begins to answer questions.

5:17 – 6:15 p.m. I shoot the CEO for about an hour. I have had enough. All I hear over and over all day is “selling short,” “being short,” “being long,” “selling long,” long and short, short and long. Between that and the “please stand clear of the doors,” and “the doors are closing” mantra on the metro, I may never sleep again.

Over 1200 frames shot and 95 images sent to ZUMA Press and my Photoshelter archive. I am whipped. But it is nice to already see 4 images in a slideshow on the Wall Street Journal web site.

All I know from the day is this… The long of it was the day. Long and tedious but very interesting. It is always fascinating to sit through Congressional hearings. It is most often a learning experience.

That happened today. I learned about the short. The short of it is that the Wall Street types who work at Goldman Sachs and all the other high-end investment firms are all smarter than the average person. Way smarter. Smarter than the Senators who had a surprisingly good grasp of the concepts behind the financial markets.

The problem is that Wall Street types know that they are smarter. And because of that fact they feel they can get away with what they had for so long. They are smart enough to know that we will not notice and if we do, we won’t understand it anyway.

The Tea Party Express rolled into Washington, D.C. for a rally on Tax Day. I should begin by saying that most of the gathering was civil, polite and having a good time. It is valuable to have a dialog in this country coming from all sides of an issue. Intelligent and constructive dialog is the basis of a strong democracy as is the right to criticize the government. But that being said, it never ceases to amaze me how closed-minded people can be ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ISSUES.

Two examples that I was witness to were both sad and funny at the same time.

The first was at the morning rally at Freedom Square. Amid the protesters was a man walking around dressed at the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland. He was carrying a sign bemoaning the fact that the FOX network was torturing America by broadcasting American Idol before Glee.

Seems simple enough, until a woman came up to him and began berating him for picking on FOX News (not what the sign said), and then saying he should be ashamed of himself for being unpatriotic because of his Uncle Sam costume. No matter how much he calmly and quietly tried to explain to her that he was not picking on FOX News and that he was dressed as the Mad Hatter, she would not listen and kept yelling at him. Obviously a case of not reading to get all the facts and not listening. The poor guy was as nice as he could be and said later that he hoped he did not ruin her day.

UPDATE: I found this YouTube video by way of The Daily Show Forum that shows the interaction between these two. (CLICK HERE)

Later there was the rally at the Washington Monument where a fan of President Obama was pleading with Tea Party members to give the President a chance. A plea that was also directed toward Democrats who voted for Obama that are now having second thoughts. This was an interesting moment with the two sides yelling at each other.

The thing I couldn’t help noticing was that the Tea Party supporters where not giving coherent arguments against what the man was saying. Instead they just kept repeating the talking points of the President’s opposition. When pressed to expound on their statements, most did not and simply went on to another talking point. Its was obvious that they had not formed their opinions from their own research. They where parroting the party line and repeating what they heard from their favorite talking heads.

I did find one other thing funny and curious. Washington, D.C. police chased off of the National Mall grounds a man who was selling “Don’t Tread on Me” flags and other banners of the Tea Party movement. According to one of the cops, selling things on federal property is not allowed. The part that was weird was he also said that they had asked Freedom Works, the organizers of the event, if they wanted him at the rally selling the flags and the Freedom Works representative said no.

So, Freedom Works does not want this man to practice capitalism at their rally and have no problem with the police and federal government dictating where someone can earn an honest living.

Seems to me to go against their beliefs about capitalism and having government interference with a person’s pursuit of a living.

More images from the Tea Party Rally in D.C. can be found in my Photoshelter Archive (CLICK HERE).

I was walking from a meeting with Graph Paper Press guru Thad Allender an was heading to the White House for an assignment when I saw this group of guys heading my way. I have really been trying to always have my camera ready and I was able to gather a few frames of them.

You just have to smile, don’t you?

I went out this morning to get a few shots of the first day of iPad sales at a local Apple store in Reston, Va.

OK, I actually went to play with an iPad and figured it is a news event, so pictures would be a good idea too.

No, I did not buy one, but I do want one. Even my wife, who is skeptical about the “latest and greatest gadget”, said “this thing is so cool.”

There was a pretty respectable line formed when we arrived but that was only for the buyers. The window shoppers where allowed in at 10 and we started to play.

And as she said, the thing is pretty damn cool. Very quick, responsive and one of those things that you just want to own because it IS so cool.

We will definitely wait until the 3G version comes out so it is truly mobile, but from what I saw, I like it.

I think just from a photographer’s standpoint, if you did nothing else with it but use it for a showcase for your portfolio, it would be worth the money. If you think about what you can spend for a really slick looking book and then the time and costs of printing, either professionally or on your home inkjet, and then the work of updating the book whenever you need to make changes, an iPad would be worth the money.

You would be able to update quickly by simply moving photos onto the iPad. You could keep multiple versions of your portfolio in folders so you can have your sports book, wedding book and any other version you may have all in one place. Want to show off your multimedia skills? Just as easy.

Yes you can do this with a laptop, but trust me, when you see the thing in person, and see the slick case made by Incase that also acts as a stand to prop it up on a table, you will see what I mean. The damn thing is just cool.

And we all want to be cool.

The last photo I shot while covering the historic Health Care vote in the House of Representatives over the weekend was also the first photo I shot on Monday, March 22, 2010.

This photo was a happy accident. It was 1 a.m. and after covering the healthcare vote for 16 hours, I was looking for my ride home. I came across this man sitting on the Capitol steps.  He looked so alone. It was not until I asked his name that I discovered he was there to protest bill and arrived late and missed all of the hoopla. The moment just seemed fitting for the day’s events.

My ride had left without me and I had to have my lovely wife, Jenny, come and give me a ride.

Sometimes a bad turn of events can turn into a good thing.

My agency, ZUMA Press, picked the photo as one of their Photos of the Day.

The image can be found on my Photoshelter Archive (Click here).

One thing I think all photojournalists know is that trying to cover any big event as a one-man-band is a lot of work and sometimes a bit of a crap shoot. Nobody can be everywhere at once. And since you can’t, you have to accept the fact that you are going to miss stuff.

So when you cover something as important as a vote on a bill that will be a massive overdue overhaul of the United States healthcare system, one can get a bit anxious.

The weekend D.C. was full of events worth photographing. Friday there was an anti-war event called Funk the War, Saturday there was a larger anti-war protest sponsored by A.N.S.W.E.R. (Coalition Act Now to Stop War & End Racism) and a tea-party protest at the Capitol against the healthcare bill. Then on Sunday came more protests against the healthcare bill as the House of Representatives prepared to vote on the bill as well as a huge immigration reform march in the city.

I decided to pace myself a bit and shoot the ant-war march on Saturday and the healthcare vote on Sunday. I was planning on trying to get to the immigration march, but it was just not going to be manageable.

I arrived at the Capitol at about 11 on Sunday and went straight to the House side to cover the protesters and the Representatives arriving for the debate and voting.

It was the typical screaming and shouting scene that usually surrounds these events. Most of the photos are typical coverage, but there where one or two that I liked the most.

I hung out until a bit after 1:00 and headed to the Senate Press Gallery to transmit images to ZUMA Press.

Then the waiting began.

There was the occasional press conference that needed to be covered as the debating went on in the House chamber and just general wandering around the Capitol looking for a good feature or two.

I have to say it is kind of weird to be able to wander the halls of the center of democracy when there really is not anyone around. Since all of the action was happening on the House side, we had to travel back and fourth from the Photographer’s Gallery on the Senate side to the House. Many times I was making the trip alone, and the beauty of the Capitol building being experienced with only the sound of your own footsteps is quite the experience. As in VERY COOL.

Around 7:00 the debate raged on with about the same intensity as the growling in the photographer’s stomachs. The usual quick food places in the Capitol were closed since it was Sunday, but we were able to get something at one of the House dining rooms. The short handed staff there was great and accommodating. They saved the day.

A television crew watches the historic vote on a monitor outside of the House Chambers.

More waiting ensued as the debating raged on until the vote came somewhere around 11:45 p.m. Even then we had to wait for a couple of more votes before Speaker Nancy Pelosi and members of the Democratic Caucus came into the Rayburn Room to speak to the press.

So after the press conference and the transmitting to ZUMA Press, I walked out of the Capitol at 12:45 a.m. to find that my ride had abandoned me. Damn photographers! Can’t trust any of them! Just kidding, but I am cranky about it.

So while trying to figure out my options, since the last metro option was an hour and a half ago, I didn’t have many. So I called my wife, Jenny, and she came to the rescue. Now that is a real trooper.

About the only good thing about the ride disaster was that I came across a nice image. There was a guy sitting on the back steps of the Capitol with a flag barely hanging on to the pole it was attached to as the wind whipped it around. Apparently he had arrived to the Tea Party protest too late. When he arrived most all had gone. And there he sat, one last remaining dissenter against the historic health care bill that had been passed almost two hours before.

He looked tired. So was I.

On the seventh anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, protestors marched from Lafayette Park across from the White House through downtown Washington D.C., Saturday carrying flag-draped cardboard coffins and signs calling for thto end to all wars and to “Indict Bush Now.”

More images from the demonstration including the Arlington Midwest exhibit on the National Mall can be found on my PhotoShelter Archive (Click Here).

Stops on the route included military contractor Halliburton, the Mortgage Bankers Association, The Washington Post offices and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The ANSWER Coalition, sponsors of the protest, claims “Halliburton has become synonymous with war profiteering” and the Washington Post “has been a staunch supporter of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and continues to operate as an apologist for U.S. aggression.”