Photographer of the Year

Copyright Casey Templeton

Some of you may remember this photo from a few weeks ago. President Bush was joking with journalists this day and made fun of this reporter about wearing sunglasses on a cloudy day. Turns out the reporter is "legally blind." Mr. Bush later apologized for his remarks. This photo was captured not by one of the veteran press photographers at the White House. Nope.

I want to introduce you to the current College Photographer of the Year, Casey Templeton. I stumbled across his website while visiting another talented photographer's web site, Mark Hancock. And while Mr. Hancock has been in the biz for years to hone his craft, Casey is still in school! Which brings me to my next thought.

One would think Casey is going to one of the major journalism schools, like Missouri, or my alma mater Western Kentucky University. Although the two did finish 1-2 for most awards at the NPPA yearly contest. No, he's a product of James Madison University. No photography program. Only one photography class! Here's part of a recent interview Casey did with Daniel Berman, a high school student in Seattle.

"They have one class in photojournalism. It's an eight-week course. I took that my sophomore year. It was great because my mentor, Tommy Thompson, taught the class. That was the one photography class I took.They also have an art department at JMU. They have several photo classes with that, but my senior year I took an independent study with an art photography class. We didn't shoot necessarily, we didn't learn much about photography. We did our own projects and talked about them in the class.So, no, there's no photojournalism program. There's not really a photo program. I just did everything but photography in college."

You can read the rest of this interview on Mark Hancock's site here.

So, please visit Casey's website. There are many photos that words just can't describe. My personal favorites are the ones of Lizzie's story.