Two minutes. 

Sometimes that’s all you have to capture a moment before it evaporates. 

This past February, I was meeting my regular shooting buddy Martin for the Red Bull Heavy Metal snowboard competition at Hart Plaza. We were walking down Woodward when a trio of kids saw my camera hanging from my neck and ran up to me: The boy with dreads excitedly asked me to take their picture.

There were some cool graphics covering an unopened storefront, so I positioned them in front of that, flipped out the rear LCD and laid on the shutter. Punching in. Filling the frame with their faces. I knew their attention span was gonna be short so I made the most of it.

I’ve never had subjects ham it up like them. 

They didn’t have a care in the world. Play fighting. Dancing. Tackling each other on the sidewalk. The raw energy of childhood screaming through their veins. Pure unadulterated joy.

In 120 seconds I made 63 exposures. Around half were keepers, and maybe half of that half were images that really resonated with me. And Takis (lead image) being the standout that I submitted to Composing Detroit. 

At the show, someone asked me if I knew the kids.

Turns out the boy with the dreads is named King Michael. He and the boy with the “Got Hot Cheetos?” hat are brothers. They’re apparently well-known hustlers, and Michael’s father adopted the other because they were such close friends and he didn’t want them separated by the system.

You can feel their love for each other through the photos.

They weren’t hawking anything in February, but when I serendipitously ran into Michael the afternoon following Composing Detroit, he had a wagon with only a handful of votive candles in tow. Business must’ve been good that morning.

I couldn’t believe the serendipity of it. When he wrapped his sales pitch, I told him we’d met before and that he asked me to take his picture. I took out my phone and showed him the pictures. He got shy and smiled. Said that it wasn’t him. 

Had Michael not seen my camera that winter morning, this set of images would’ve never happened. And Takis was the framed print that sold at the gallery, with the buyer telling me it was the only piece in the entire show that made her smile. 

Carrying a giant camera around isn’t my favorite thing. 

Until it is.

I love my Nikon Z6ii, but compared to the warhorse D700 I upgraded from it lacks balance. The body with battery and memory card is just under a 1.5 pounds (24.9 ounces). Add the FTZ adapter and my F-mount 24 - 70mm f/2.8 and it’s so incredibly front heavy that even my giant mitts get tired holding it. And unlike the D700, there’s no place on the grip for my right pinky.

To fix this and make up for the difference in DSLR battery life, I bought the MB-N11 battery grip. I’ve never owned a grip before because I never felt like I needed one, either for ergonomics or power reasons. 

I could get roughly 1,000 shots off a single charge with the D700. Like, I shot the 2018 Detroit Auto Show on one battery. And aside from the grip being a little shallower than the D5300 I upgraded from, I had no complaints with its handling. 

What surprised me was just how obvious the grip made my camera. Sometimes that was awesome. Like when I was at Muddy Roots in 2021. A stage manager saw me in the crowd and invited me to shoot Heavy Temple from side stage. Body + grip + telephoto lens is impossible to miss, turns out.

Other times that’s less helpful. The 24 - 70 is my main lens and even that kit draws lots of attention. Not great when I’m downtown and someone yells at me about my camera from across the street and starts following me. 

Thankfully, the good has outweighed the bad.