Greg Latza’s Blog

There are many great things associated with working out of your house.

You can take a power nap whenever you want. You can do a day’s worth of work in boxer shorts and a t-shirt. You can challenge your wife/co-worker with an impromptu ping-pong match or mow the lawn during a long break.

But it’s not all gravy. You can find yourself piling on very long hours during busy periods, simply because it’s easy to walk downstairs and plop yourself in front of the computer for some editing or correspondence. I often do the bulk of my best work late at night after the kids are in bed…but this can happen after an already long day of shooting or desk time.

It’s a lifestyle that would be hard for me to leave at this point in my life. I haven’t had to listen to a real boss in over 12 years (not counting my wife), and I completely dictate the course of my work. 

Some freelancers have a hard time combining their house and office, but Jodi and I just take it in stride. I love the idea that the lives of our family can spill into my work time, as it did last week when I flew Anna to Kentucky with me for a shoot, and the opposite can be true when I need space to spread out in, as illustrated by the photo above: our basement ping-pong table doubled nicely as a drying table yesterday while I made several 20×30 fine art prints for a local hospital. 

The overhead is low. If I’m not shooting, there’s no rent or utilities to pay. My cost of doing business is basically the computers, photo gear and printing supplies. Lots of freelancers have gone out of business simply because they overextended themselves with office and studio costs and weren’t ready to pay for those amenities during an economic downturn. 

The main problems we have are things like not being able to play ping pong when daddy is printing photos. It’s a small price to pay.

Matt Kryger. One of a kind. 

Matt and I became good friends way back in 1989, back when we were both journalism students at South Dakota State University and striving to find our respective places in the newspaper business. 

We had lots of success. Matt spent three summers interning in LaCrosse, Wisconsin and a summer at the Indianapolis Star, and I spent a summer in Rochester, Minnesota and a summer in Milwaukee at the Milwaukee Journal. After a few years in the newspaper business, I found freelance to be my true calling after realizing that I didn’t enjoy daily newspaper politics and strange schedules, but Matt excelled at this type of work and has been in Indianapolis for about 13 years now, and is arguably that paper’s best sports photographer.

Matt has covered the two recent Superbowls in which the Colts participated, and countless playoff and regular season games. He wears a trademark red baseball cap so his daughters can more easily find him on TV, and of course it make him easier for us to spot as well. 

It’s always fun to see him throughout a game on the sidelines, but the real fun begins when the game ends and the quarterbacks and coaches head out to midfield to greet each other, a herd of photographers in tow. On Sunday, the first person we saw as Peyton Manning crossed the field was Matt, skillfully hand-checking a nearby photographer from entering his shot and backpedaling with Manning as he strolled to find Jets QB Mark Sanchez. 

We just had to laugh. “Uncle Matt!” the kids exclaimed. Kryger strikes again.

Matt’s other claim to fame is his unique collection of “famous people self portraits,” many of which can be viewed in this gallery.

Merry Christmas!

I would love to report that our holiday was merry and gay, but mostly it was cold and snowy. 

We got 19 inches of snow over the course of a three-day blizzard that spanned Christmas Day. Yes, we definitely had a white Christmas.

The boys could barely navigate the backyard, and are shown here laying atop a 4-foot tall snow drift. Many houses in our part of town had snow drifted all the way up to the gutters, and while it was fairly inconvenient, it definitely made Christmas memorable. This winter is shaping up to be the worst one since the legendary winter of 1996-97.

Sigh.

I’m guessing it could be a very interesting spring, complete with flooding pictures and lots of muddy fields. Bad for farmers, good for photographers. I’ll never forget how incredible the spring of 1997 was: I covered weeks of flooding for several news agencies and national newspapers and magazines, and of course that was the year that Grand Forks flooded.

Now if we can only keep the sump pump running…

No sooner had I crossed New Mexico off my list of “States I’ve Never Had An Assignment In,” when I found myself flying to Arkansas to the first time for a farm supply company lifestyle shoot.

We were chasing the last of autumn’s color, and finally caught up with it here in the mountains of northwest Arkansas. Lots of fall and winter clothing, horses and tack, tools and livestock. The weather was cool and crisp in the mornings and warm in the afternoons; a perfect shoot to officially end the fall shooting season for me. Back in South Dakota, the leaves are already long gone from the trees, and won’t appear again until April. That’s a long time for someone who loves to see nature’s colors.

Pretty soon everything will be white, and cold, and monotone. 

Why do I live here? Well, I’d like to say it’s because I enjoy witnessing a definite changing of the seasons, but every year I dread winter more. Maybe because I’m getting old? 

When I got the call to do some work for a large American oil company, I was envisioning ocean-bound drilling platforms or maybe even refineries tucked along waterways on the Eastern seaboard. 

I definitely wasn’t thinking North Dakota.

But alas, there’s black gold far beneath the prairies up north, and I went there to explore the results. Turns out that there’s a monstrous deposit of oil-bearing shale about two miles down, and it could potentially contain the same amount of oil that has ever been drilled throughout World history. That’s a lot of oil to wrap your mind around. The trick is getting to it, and forcing it to come bubbling up. 

There’s been lots of success with it so far, and along with the success there have been some instant millionaires sprouting where only poor ranchers had been before. Some of these folks can handle that sudden wealth just fine, and some can’t. The ones who can’t handle it find themselves bickering in court with family members who are demanding a share of the wealth, and some clans have been torn apart as a result. 

I’d like to go back up there someday to cover that aftermath, and to dig up the personal stories behind North Dakota’s black gold rush.