ED WILLIAMS

In 1998, I quit my engineering position and moved from Georgia to the Florida Gulf Coast with my wife. We had turned 50 years old the previous year and, with our children grown and on their own, we decided we needed to do something we enjoyed doing rather than something that made a fair amount of money. We had bought a vacation home in Walton County, Florida, in 1997 and decided a move to the beach was just what the doctor ordered.

Now we knew eventually we would need to get jobs for health insurance, property taxes, food, utilities and the like but we took the first six months off and did nothing. We took the monies from selling our previous home, an inheritance from my dad and my 401K and paid off the vacation, now permanent, home. I started going out and about to try to get my fledgling photography business off the ground but was having little luck. I was an unknown in the area with very few published images over the years but had high hopes. I had always thought about being a freelance photojournalist or a newspaper shooter so I started covering local events. Eventually, I walked into a fledgling weekly newspaper with a bunch of photos of a local high school girls' volleyball team winning their first district championship. It was a very small school that got little to no coverage from the two dailies in the counties on either side of us so I was the lone shooter at the school. From that point on, I would weekly walk in before the paper's weekly deadline with images showcasing events of all types in the area. At first, I was paid by the image but that change within a year as I became a contract photographer for the paper. Eventually, I was brought on fulltime in 2005 as the sole staff shooter and sports reporter.

This image is from that first year on staff at a juried arts festival. The image ran as three columns and filled most of a page. I submitted the image later that year to the Florida Press Association yearly contest where the image took first place in the Feature Photography category.

The image is of a local guitarist, Ed Williams, that I had met several years earlier and taken photos of during events..