NHRA top fuel dragster driver T.J. Zizzo during qualifying for the Route 66 Nationals at Route 66 Raceway.

I decided to have some fun with my latest set of images from the NHRA Route 66 Nationals drag race, shot last weekend at Route 66 Raceway in Joliet, Illinois. In addition to experimenting with lighting night racing sessions with several photographic strobe units (helping to accentuate the contrast between the white smoke from the race cars and dark night sky), I also converted the color images to black and white for display here on the blog.

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Twelve-year-old Dakota Betancourt of Griffith, Ind., gets a birds-eye-view of the Griffith Independence Day Parade from atop the Army tank in Central Park along Broad St., Monday, July 4, 2011.

If there’s one thing more exciting than watching a professional fireworks show on Independence Day, at least for me, it would have to be photographing one! I spent a lot of time growing up shooting (and only marginally succeeding at) fireworks shows on 35mm film. After all, fireworks photography is a very technically demanding art. It requires that you know your camera’s controls intimately in the full manual realm, and that you’re able to make changes on the fly to compensate for the fireworks’ unpredictable locations in the frame along varying brightnesses and colors.

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The grandstands along the front stretch, the oldest in the facility, at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway prior to the Indianapolis 500.

A friend of mine once quipped that I needed to quit living in the past. Admittedly, I could be diagnosed as a low-level nostalgia addict. I love studying old photos of familiar places, both ones I’ve found and ones I’ve shot long ago. Old videos, well, those are even better! The layers of sound and motion make those images come alive, a veritable time machine transporting my mind with each push of “rewind”.

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Gary Splash’s Robert Eldridge (top) shoots up and over Lansing’s Carlos Gill during the fourth quarter at the Genesis Center in Gary, Ind., Sunday, April 17, 2011.

With the NBA playoffs underway, and scores of local fans chasing after the bandwagons of their “favorite” teams, I decided to dig through my archives and pull some of my favorite basketball images from the 2010-2011 season. While there are a couple of images from college and semi-pro teams, the majority of them were shot at high school matches. High school games always seem more emotionally “true” for some reason, probably because the players are in it strictly for the love of the sport, free from the haze of endorsement deals and celebrity pomp.

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