Patrick McDermott | Visual Journalist

With Autumn just around the corner, I once again have become restless for the arrival of winter.  Over the years I have photographed a ton of cool events and really important people, but what I love the most to photograph is skiing or snowboarding or anything that has me around snow.  So as soon as the first snow falls in the Rockies or Sierra Nevada Mountains and I don’t answer my phone, know that I’m off doing what I do best.

Over the past few months, a ton of people have asked me what it is like to do the job I do.  To try to start to answer that question, I decided to pool a collection of fun photographs of fellow photographers that I took during my travels over the last year or so.  Even though these photos show the fun side of the job, it is really a ton of hard work and long hours to get the photographs that we produce day in and day out.  Enjoy!

I believe one of the greatest things that we can do as photographers is to look back at our old work from years past.  It allows us to see the remarkable growth that we have had over the years in both our photographic skills but also how we approach the medium. It also allows us to truly appreciate how lucky we are to have the job we have. We get to take photographs and call it work. Pretty amazing in my book. But more importantly it allows us to see where we came from. The two photographs below are ones that I photographed when his Holiness, the Dalia Lama, received the Congressional Gold Medal from President Bush on October 17, 2007. What is special about these photographs is not the content or whom I got to photograph, but instead as I have recently realized that it was on this day I started my career as a photojournalist.