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I was recently invited to work with an upandcomer non-profit interested in securing funding.  So many people were interested, I was prompted to post the notes from my talk here, on my blog. This is just an outline and a brief overview, but I hope it will help educate and inspire you to reach out as far as is needed for you to pursue your dreams – no matter how overwhelming they may seem at the beginning of your journey. Basically, my experience encompassed two main scenarios in my quest to acquire funding through grants.    Sometimes, I would find money available, then match it to a relevant project I would design according to what one of my clients needed.   In most cases, they were heretofore unaware of even the availability or desirability of funding for a project.  Needless to say, a lot of projects fell by the wayside.  “Rails to Trails,” converting old, abandoned RR tracks to hiking and biking trails is a perfect example as 99% are happy to have them-for all of the obvious reason

 One of the surprising things they never taught me in college regarding my journalism and photojournalism career, is that the story you pursue is not always the story you will ultimately write. I learned to be open minded, never give up, and what surprises you, will end up surprising your readers. That actually happened several times to me, and it was a wake-up call. There's a couple that stick out as the ones that were a total surprise, and received a healthy number of hits, creating a win win for all.  Since it's mid November, it seems the perfect time to blog about my pursuing a Thanksgiving story about Native Americans. Those of you who know me a little better, know I am always interested in something unusual and out of the box, so putting the pilgrims and puritans aside for something different, sounded fun and intriguing for both my readers and myself.  For this particular story, I wanted to photograph Pueblo ruins and talk about Native Americans for a Thanksgiving piece.

  Obviously, this isn't a ghost, an orb, or even paranormal.  It's simply a skeleton-albeit a rather large one that I discovered and was impressed by its creative posers who placed it in an especially precarious and intriguing way to get us all in the spirit of Halloween. Not to mention, my admiration for the people who bravely climbed up this mast, to get skel' up so high! This curious photo however, wasn't staged nor even edited or tweaked, and begs more investigation into the question if we can capture paranormal activity with our cameras.  It was taken in an old mine and had the same low lighting around it as in the rest of this mine.  Although I'd snapped many photos throughout my tour of this mine, none looked like this.  There were small round lights installed throughout, to help people see where they were walking but all showed up as simply small, round lights and certainly with no reflection all the way around the walls and on the ceiling.  Some investigato