Selected images culled from my personal explorations and daily documentary work for the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, Wisconsin USA

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” 

- W.B. Yeats

LEÓN, Nicaragua - Seven doctors and a surgical tech from Madison plunged into a sea of need: parents clutching toddlers with cleft lips and cleft palates, women hiding faces with grotesque bumps and birthmarks, men whose crooked noses suggested car crashes or bar fights. A baby smiled through a mouth two times too wide. They were waiting for the American doctors to join Nicaraguan doctors and perform the transformative magic of reconstructive plastic surgery. By the end of their visit, the UW-Madison doctors would be reshaped, too.

A Wisconsin State Journal assignment in Nicaragua exploring the University of Wisconsin's Global Health Initiative offered an opportunity to capture this secondary set of personal images which share my impressions of the bustling, colorful and geographically beautiful country.

Continuing a winter tradition of harvesting ice from local waterways, a small community of Amish workers in Green Lake County Wisconsin cut, remove and transport hundreds of 80-pound blocks which are stored in nearby families' ice houses to be used throughout the year.

In 2011, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker set off a political firestorm when he announced a plan to fix a state budget deficit by forcing higher benefit costs onto state and local government workers and eliminating nearly all of their collective bargaining powers.

The move quickly put Wisconsin at the center of a divisive national debate over the cost of government and the rights of workers.

In more than 170 related stories, the State Journal chronicled the series of wildly unexpected and historic political developments that followed: All 14 of Wisconsin's Democratic senators fled the state to block a vote on the measure; warrants were issued to forcibly haul them back; schools closed as teachers joined the protests; and the Capitol turned into a protest village.

They sleep in beaten vehicles and tents in the woods. Doubled up with family or friends in worn apartments and ratty motel rooms. Huddled under bridges and in crowded shelters.

The stereotype is a weathered denizen of the Capitol Square. In reality, perhaps half are children, most out of sight.

Despite the efforts of many, perhaps 2,400 men, women and children are homeless on any given night in Madison.

An ongoing series of nature and botanical captures exploring an in-camera layering technique. The photographs are typically a composite of three consecutive exposures, composed in advance and envisioned as multiple exposures while accounting for elements of color, tonality, composition and depth.

A project exploring the concept of time and the transient nature of words and messaging.

Random observations, curious juxtapositions and moments that just make you go hmm..

After 19-year-old Tony Robinson was shot and killed by a Madison, Wis. police officer following a struggle, protests, demonstrations and vigils took place on the city’s streets, reminiscent of those that followed the deaths of black men in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York, after confrontations with police.