Got out yesterday to my first wildfire in a long, long time when things started to get dicey in the 4S Ranch/Santa Luz area of San Diego. Most of the big flames had died down by the timeI arrived (though friend and colleague Sandy Huffaker made some nice pictures of the fire and I focused on the firefighters knocking down the hotspots and the concerned residents, as well as photographing some of the charred hillsides

I'm certainly not the first to say it but it sure looks like CA is in for a long wildfire season.

Everybody knows those pictures. Everybody has those pictures.

They’re slightly faded and slightly amateurish. They’re tucked into – no, stuck inside – thin sleeves of worn plastic. They’re wrapped into a faux leather-bound album or lost in the bottom of a shoebox.

There’s your mother in one of the frames, lighting your first birthday cake. There’s your brother learning to ride a bike, the colored beads on the spokes so familiar, but the setting so difficult to place. There’s you on vacation, on your first day of school, you goofing off and just enjoying a regular old Sunday afternoon.

These are the pictures that chronicled the rise of us Millennials long before our generation had a name. Before anyone knew what a megapixel was and before Photoshop became a verb, we still used so many beautiful tools to capture and preserve the world around us.

I wrote in January about the whirlwind world of a photojournalist  and the pressures involved in pursuing this career. They’re real, they’re deep-seeded – they wrench at you when you need sleep the most. And to ease some of that tension, I had to remember why I picked up a camera in the first place.

It wasn’t to earn a day rate or to impress a client. It wasn’t even to publish the images. It was just a yearning to remember important moments from the places and people I called home.

Over the years, my home has grown. I’ve added a wife and two cats. I’ve met countless friends. I’ve launched into a career path that puts me in communities I would have never otherwise considered being part of.

Using my old family camera, I’ve been chronicling the world around me and trying to understand exactly where this project is going. As it starts to take shape, hopefully it will help me find out where I am going.

I spent a morning recently inside Richard J. Donovan State Prison photographing their operations for Bloomberg. Was interesting working my way around through the bakery, the shoe factory and all around the yard. We even got a rainbow in there!