Now that the flood waters are receding, and it seems the cities of Fargo and Moorhead were spared any catastrophic damage, it seems we can breathe a sigh of relief. 

I wanted to share with you this really cool post I found by a former resident of Fargo, who works for a visual arts company called concept3D. He came back to help sandbag, and then made this post to try to help people grasp the sheer enormity of how much sand was bagged and placed by the river. Here is just one of the great pictures he posted!

For a lot more great visuals, check out the rest of the article he wrote over on the concept3D blog!

So life has been pretty crazy here for the last few weeks. The National Weather Service started coming out a couple weeks ago and predicting a record flood for where I live here in Fargo, ND. As the days went by, the projected crest kept getting higher and higher, and calls for sandbaggers began to grow more and more urgent.  On Tuesday, I went to help some of my friends sandbag their homes to protect them against the rising river, which was starting to get pretty scary already. So far I believe both of these homes have continued to survive, but are still in danger.

Thankfully, the crest appears to have happened already at just under 41 feet (the worst case scenario had risen to 43 feet!).  It is still the highest water level ever recorded in Fargo, and there are still calls for urgency in maintaining the dikes. However, people are starting to have hope that the worst may be over and that we may escape major flooding and mass evacuations. Here are some pictures from the last few days I wanted to share!

Here are some shots of the group I helped and the houses we sandbagged.

The following shots were me just shooting as I drove. I tried to show a few different methods of sandbagging and diking that various homes were using. I also tried to capture the chaotic feeling and sense of urgency there was this whole time. Don’t worry, I was in the area en route to and from sandbagging, I didn’t just drive in here to shoot pictures.

There were many places to volunteer, such as the Fargodome.  Some people were used filling bags all over the city, and others were bussed to the danger zones to help actually place the bags. Schools and NDSU were closed and all students were encouraged to help sandbag. Businesses were encouraged to close, both to keep traffic off of main roads, and so workers could help volunteer. Here you can see a bus bringing volunteers.

A digital billboard in Fargo changed from showing advertisements to being flood information and telling people where they could volunteer. And yes, during the most necessary and stressful part of the flood fight, after we had found out the river could crest even higher than expected, we received a massive and awful snowstorm which dumped 8 inches of snow on us.  The roads became horrible as all of the big equipment that would have been used to plow were needed at the dikes. On the other hand, the cold temperatures are what slowed the melt and runoff into the river, and helped the river crest lower, so I guess it wasn’t the worst possible thing ever.

This was one of the neighborhoods most in danger. Huge trucks and tractors were dumping dirt everywhere to make the dikes higher, and you can see urgent sandbagging happening too. By the way, the river is normally on the OTHER side of those trees.

These final shots were taken as we crossed over the Red River the last few days. The river is so high that it was absolutely unreal. I can’t even describe the magnitude of it via pictures, because the river was so wide and covering so much land that you would need to be shooting from the air to capture it!

I only had my point and shoot with me when I took this picture, so I wasn’t able to leave the shutter open as long as I wanted to...hopefully you can see that at this point on Thursday night, the river was already higher than downtown, and the dikes were the only thing protecting downtown from being under a few feet of water!

These final shots were taken Sunday while the river is cresting. This is the first exit in Minnesota on I-94.  It has been totally closed down and the dike built right over the road. Sadly, I tried to take a few pictures when it was being built, but for some reason my point and shoot camera made a mistake and didn’t save them! Doh! It was an amazing site. There were literally scores of trucks dumping dirt, tractors, etc. I had never seen so many flashing lights in my life.  I really wanted to go back and reshoot, but traffic was so bad I wasn’t willing to do it again. Here it is today, though.

Overall, this has been a very stressful experience. But at the same time, it has been impressive. The Fargo-Moorhead community really pulled together.  There were thousands of volunteers willing to help in whatever neighborhood needed help, and the National Guard has been amazing at patrolling the dikes and fixing any problems found with them. Now that it appears there is a good chance we may not lose massive parts of the city, we can hopefully begin to destress.  There is still a lot of work to do, as all this will need to be cleaned up after, and some people that have lost their homes will need to be helped, but overall the battle seems to be being won. 

Nate and Sarah are good friends of mine, and so I can’t even tell you how excited I was last year when I found out they are having a baby! We went out this past weekend to do some pictures, as she is getting very close to her due date. They have some names that they like, but they want to see him first before they decide what his name will be, and so I have nicknamed him JJ. Sarah is definitely a glowing mom-to-be, and I love these shots we got of her and Nate. And of course, none of us can wait to meet JJ.

For this last one, we wanted to do something artistic. I think/hope we succeeded. And don’t worry. Although this might look cold, she was only actually here for a few short seconds.

I will add a few more pictures to this post later when Nate and Sarah finish picking out their favorites from the proofs! Check back later if you’d like to check them out!

During my last senior shoot with Kaleb, he wanted to take a fun shot of himself playing the guitar. I forgot to post it earlier with the original post and decided to make it a quick 1-picture post today! I added a little radial blur to make it look like the sound wave is comin’ at ya! I hope you like it!

Winter in Fargo means not a lot of opportunities to take fun shots outdoors, so I haven’t been extremely busy lately shooting. But I did go to a party a couple weekends back and came away with some fun shots!

At one point, the lead singer handed out some maracas and Bill led a train around the dance floor!

The band, HORIZON.

This little boy was entertaining himself by pouring the water in these cups back and forth...back and forth...

Well! It took me a little longer than I’d thought to get all of these finished up, but here they are as promised! I really enjoyed working with Josh and Jen, and I’m really looking forward to 2009 to keep moving forward as a photographer! Here are the shots we got!

Don’t ask about this last one. I don’t get it either. Ha!

Fargo almost never gets shut down. We laugh at snow! Even more, we laugh at those southern cities where a couple inches of snow fall, and the whole city shuts down. We’d be shut down 4 months out of the year if we did that. You can get a foot of snow here, and it will slow things down, but things won’t stop. I remember having school growing up when the temperatures were -80 wind chill. So it takes something huge to shut us down. Well, yesterday we got it.

Yesterday, we had a blizzard...a REAL blizzard. It seems every year we get some sort of chance of a blizzard, but they never really materialize or they are just weak. Not this year! I honestly can’t recall a time when I have seen such a powerful blizzard come through...not in the last 10 years at least! I snagged a couple pictures during the blizzard and a few outside our apartment building this morning to show what how high the snow drifted and had to be piled up. I might snag a few more if I go out later today...stuck working right now! As for why there aren’t more pictures of during the blizzard, are you crazy? hehe! It was snowing like mad, with 40 mph winds and -45 wind chill. We saw people getting their 4-wheel drives stuck in our parking lot.

The television was full of cancellations for school the next day...even Fargo schools decided to close the day before! Restaurants and businesses were all closed...simply because people couldn’t even drive through the city to get to work! Even having a 4-wheel drive was useless, we saw them getting stuck in the street! I would have taken a picture of that, except for the most part, we couldn’t even see the street through the blowing snow, just catching glimpses of the trucks stuck out there!

This was a first for me. I had never seen the wind pound so hard that it forced snow through the screen door and the door, piling up a huge amount of snow inside the door. We actually had to open the door and screen and force the snow outside, because it was getting so heavy we were afraid it would tear the screen. And no, outside is not overexposed, you just can’t see anything through the snow!


You can see the cars outside getting buried, and this was during one of the short periods where we could actually see the building next door. There were many times when the snow was blowing so hard we could barely even make out its outline. Later on, the tree had a 6-foot snow drift around it! I was going to take a picture of it this morning, but the wind had completely rearranged the drifts by the time I woke up!

Here are the shots I got this morning.

And amazingly, the blizzard is over, the streets are getting cleaned, and tomorrow life will go on normally.

After spending a fun weekend with friends in northern Minnesota, I was driving back to Fargo on Monday morning and drove by a spot where I saw several bald eagles! I’ve never had any success getting shots of them before, but I just happened to have my camera and my 300 mm lens with me! I pulled over to the side of the road and to my surprise and amazement, they all set down on trees right along the road and posed for me! I hope you like these! I am super thrilled!

There are actually 3 bald eagles in this shot! Can you find the third one?

Sunday night I had the privilege of spending the evening with a super fun couple! Josh and Jenny June!  Too bad it already gets so dark so early around these parts, and then add in the clouds, and we weren’t able to get any shots in before it got dark! But we headed over to the hotel where Josh and Jen are having their reception, the Holiday Inn of Fargo, and we had a lot of fun! It’ll take me a few more days at least to get them all completely finished up, but here is a quick preview of what’s to come!

Here is my first senior portrait shoot! I am quite happy with how these turned out, and Kaleb had a lot of fun too! Look within the next few weeks for part 2 of his shoot! It was really funny, when I asked Kaleb if he minded if I put these up on the blog, he said, “No, go ahead! Then I get to see more of my mug!” haha! 

And here is just a fun shot we did, with Kaleb raising his Axe to the sunset!