Pilot Gerry Flaugher of Poplar Grove, Ill., flies a Ford Tri-Motor over Valparaiso, Ind., during a demonstration flight originating from the Porter County Regional Airport in Valparaiso, Ind., Monday, October 3, 2011. The aircraft, built in 1929, is one of seven left in the world that is still able to fly.

Whenever I have a photo assignment that involves flying, there’s a common theme that runs through every FBO I walk into. Everyone is always smiling and in a good mood! For those not obsessed with aviation lingo, an FBO at an airport is a “fixed base operator”

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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Eight-year-old Tyrese McCray (right) of East Chicago, Ind., works with his step brother and sisters to help Maria Gonzales (background) dig her car out of the snow on the 141st block of Indianapolis Blvd. in East Chicago, Ind., during a winter snow storm, Wednesday, February 2, 2011.

Call me a skeptic, or perhaps a cynic, but I’m usually the one who goes against the grain and doesn’t buy “hype”. I don’t make investments in new gear until I’ve thoroughly researched the product (sometimes for months on end) to make sure it’s right for me. I won’t buy that shiny new car until I’ve taken it for a test drive, including making the salesman uncomfortable by punching the accelerator to see what kind of “get up and go” it has. And, even at age ten, I knew Crystal Pepsi was doomed from the get-go.

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Ice skaters are reflected in a glass ceiling near Robson Square in downtown Vancouver prior to the start of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.

As I prepare to enter my 29th year of life on the planet Earth, I’ve become keenly aware of what has become a shocking, yet accepted, ideal of my daily existence: The older I get, the quicker time goes by. 2010 has been a textbook example of this theorem, with the year zipping past me more rapidly than my mental reflexes had time to react to. While lamenting on this accelerated time warp of life to a colleague at a holiday party last weekend (I could have sworn I saw the Grim Reaper smoking a cigarette against a car while looking at his watch outside that place), I was reassured that a year that seemed fleeting was only that way because I’d been busy and completed a lot of work. It wasn’t until I sat down and begin sifting through my photo shoots from 2010 that I realized that I have indeed done quite a bit this year!

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