Professor of photography Jim Flory will be photographing the Olympic trials for track and field...

The best thing about teaching photography is getting students excited about expressing themselves with a tool as powerful as the camera and the images that come from it. Photography is a very positive tool for building confidence in being creative and self-esteem from being successful. I always tell my students this is an art form they can use all of their lives. Seeing the excitement students have for photography fuels the passion that I have for teaching them and for working on my own photography. I always feel like I learn just as much from them as they learn from me.

I was a Biology major so I have always been interested in the natural world and expressing how it looks to me. I actually was in to filmmaking in college and had several movie cameras until one Christmas my older brother gave me a Nikon camera as a gift. That changed everything for me because I found the still image to be very exciting and powerful and equipment was much less cumbersome to carry and work with and definitely less expensive.

I have always been interested in the ability to “freeze” the moving image and began to look at sports photography as a means to feed that interest and experiment with freezing and moving motion.

My two sons were both good athletes so I began shooting all of the sports they played in middle and high school. Their coaches loved all of the photos I took for them and allowed me to stand with the teams on the field, join them in the locker room, even ride the bus with them. This allowed me to build a great sports portfolio. I always managed to get passes to a variety of sporting events and became a photography “junkie” for sports.  Having the Olympic Trials for Track and Field here in Oregon piqued my interest for wanting to shoot on that photographic stage.

I inquired with the Photo Editor at the News-Times here in Forest Grove. He said the process was easy but because of the volume of Photographers trying to get credentials to be there it was basically a “land-grab”, first come first serve. I gave him the information he needed way ahead of the submission date and it paid off.

I am very excited about the opportunity to learn even more from the best sports photographers in the country and to build a portfolio of images from the competition that chooses our Olympic Track and Field team for China this year.