Dropped off some long-neglected film the other day with no concept of what was on it, except that I thought there were some engagement photos shot by my good friend James Gregg . When I picked them up, there was a notice on the envelope:

*probably set on Bulb setting (Blurry/over exposed)
*over lapping frames
set arrow on back of camera to 12 <--

I said to the guy "yup, that sounds about right."

"Don't worry," he told me. "You'll learn. It just takes some experience."

Shots from North Park, El Cajon, a bike ride to Tijuana and some snaps from Mexico City.

One day during my senior year of college, when I was working day in and day out at a breakneck pace, my life came to a very sudden, brief stop.

I was working 30 hours a week at the school newspaper, putting in another 30 hours a week at an internship and putting about 20 more hours a week into my capstone courses at school.

In my free time, rather than sleep, I tried to learn photography and, when I wasn't occupied with something productive, I would go out drinking with my friends until 2 a.m.

I was young and I felt young. But I coped well with the pressure, bottling my stress inside or drinking it away.

Until one day. After a long night with my friends, I woke up with what was not a hangover, but a bonafide exhaustion attack. I was finished. I was in tears, the pressure of everything I had to get done coming crashing down. The day before, my boss took one look at me when I walked into my internship and told me to go home. I objected, but he wouldn't budge.

"You look like shit," he told me.

When my body decided to quit on me the next day, I drove to meet my mother at an Applebee's in Mira Mesa where she promised to feed me and talk me through everything.

By the time the food arrived, I couldn't even sit up. We took the food to go and I climbed into my mother's mini van. I threw up into the Applebee's bag. But what happened next solved everything, at least temporarily. I went home.

It was just for a night or two. But I shut out the pressures of work and school and partying and meeting girls and I slept and ate real food made by a real mother.

Lately I've been feeling a bit melancholy again. I feel pressure, yes, but not the same type of all-day-slog, energy-drink-fueled pressure that I felt before. No, the pressure now is different. It's a pressure to keep growing my craft when I've already had success relative to what I ever expected. It's pressure to innovate and push my work into new frontiers. It's the pressure of looking around and comparing yourself to the 25-year-old who's shooting for a better publication than you are, while looking at the 45-year-old who's seen and done it all, and wondering how you'll ever get there.

In this field we all feel like this from time to time. In an effort not to combat the feelings but to mitigate them with something that heals me through familiarity, I'm beginning a new project.

These first photos are from homes -- my childhood home and my brother's new home -- during the Thanksgiving holidays. But the familiarity isn't just the subject matter. For this new project, I'll be documenting everyday life with the tools I used as a child -- whichever ones I can drag out of the closets of my parents' home.

These 14 frames are from a Pentax Zoom 70 . It's cracked up near the flash, but it turns out it still works. It doesn't do the "Zoom" part of the "Zoom 70" anymore, but I will get by without it. And in the coming weeks, I'll be trying to drag out other tools that I used as a child to see what's still in working order.

I'm not going to call this a personal project. All projects are personal. This is just a new exploration that will help me feel at home with a camera in my hands.

Throughout December and the start of January, I worked on a project with Voice of San Diego looking at what the San Diego Police Department does or doesn't do to combat racial profiling on traffic stops. Basically, we found that the local PD was not following its own protocol to collect demographic information on traffic stops.r 

This was one of those stories that started out to be very non-visual but with a lot of great reporting from my colleagues Liam Dillon and Megan Burks turned out to be a lot of fun to shoot.

The challenges were myriad. The San Diego Police Department absolutely refused to give me a ride-along with officers. Some of the folks we needed to photograph were in the throes of a court settlement and we went a thousand rounds with some folks who agreed to be photographed and then proved to be less than cooperative.

But we wound up with a nice wrap and a nice layout for it all. We wound up photographing a man who successfully sued the city for a large sum of cash after a judge ruled that the city violated his fourth amendment rights on a traffic stop. I shot portraits of the head of the local Black Police Officers Association, who said that he himself was racially profiled during his young days on the force. And I photographed a very tense meeting with the reporters and the top brass of the SDPD.

Here are come of my favorites from the project, including a few we didn't run. And take a look at the whole thing laid out over at VOSD.

Benjamin Kelso, head of the local Black Police Officers Association, pictured at the location where he believes fellow SDPD officers racially profiled him at a traffic stop 20 years ago.

A San Diego police officer makes a traffic stop on University Avenue in City Heights.

Dante Harrell in the City Heights parking lot where SDPD officers tasered him.

Top brass from the San Diego Police Department respond to questions about racial profiling.

Joshua Chanin, a public affairs professor at San Diego State University, talks about why racial profiling matters. "“It really is about feelings of legitimacy and trust between minority communities and the cops,” Chanin said.

Joshua Jones at the location where he believes he was racially profiled by SDPD.

San Diego Police Chief William Lansdowne.

A police officer peels away on University Avenue.