📸 Viewfinder 07/12/26

A photo of a 14-year-old sitting on a pallet of potting soil sat in my hard drive for over a year … and it was still too late before I realized its significance.

In April 2025, I was less than a month into my first job as a visual journalist at CDN. I’d been assigned to spend Easter Sunday with Brianna and Brady Rose, a mother and son who live apart due to Brady’s behavioral disorder diagnoses.

In the days leading up to the visit, reporter Charlotte Alden filled me in on the family's story. As Brady got older and bigger, his aggressive tendencies became too much for Brianna and her husband, Jacob Hainer, to handle on their own. She sought out help from local and state agencies, but quickly found there was no appropriate recourse for their situation.

While I’d spent years reporting on sensitive situations as a writer, this was my first time covering a story of this nature as a photojournalist. I felt uncomfortable with the idea of taking up space and attention during the family's short weekly visits.

To compensate for this apprehension, I committed myself to photographing as much of the family gathering as possible. I thought of this as exposure therapy.

Charlotte and I met Brianna, Brady and Jacob at a game store, where we spent three hours playing board games and walking around a nearby Home Depot (at Brady's insistence).

The then 14-year-old, who showed up wearing a pair of bunny ears to commemorate Easter, guided us through the store’s outdoor section, pointing out his favorite flowers and plants.

The sun was shining after a rainy morning, and big fluffy cumulus clouds filled the sky. Brady sat on bags of soil and closed his eyes. Maybe it was because he was with his family, or the warmth of the sun hitting his face, but in that moment, Brady smiled. I did as I had promised myself I would and got a picture of the moment.

I didn't see the family for three months, during which Charlotte dug deeper into their story.

We met up again at Ferndale Pride that July. I had more experience under my belt; I had the benefit of knowing and being comfortable with the trio — and I had a much better understanding of their situation.

I’d convinced myself the visit would go a very specific way: mother and son laughing and walking together through a rainbow-themed celebration. I learned not to make assumptions like that again after the short visit, most of which was spent in a dimly lit corner of a community center at a bracelet-making station.

The visual story I was looking to tell about a loving mother and the mountains she was moving for her son would have to be told without them in the same picture.

I visited Brianna at her home in Blaine a month later in hopes of finding an angle that would bring the story together visually.

I found it.

Every square foot of Brianna’s property was covered by vegetable plants and flowers.

As she walked around her yard, picking squash and cutting dahlias for a bouquet, she told me gardening afforded her a way to express her nurturing side, something she lamented not being able to always do with Brady. I photographed her as we talked.

Charlotte’s reporting continued for nine months. In June of this year, I was asked to prepare the photos for her story.

That's when I realized why, perhaps, Brady had gravitated toward the Home Depot outdoors section. I saw my picture of him among some flowers that was strikingly similar to one I had of Brianna in her garden.

A love for flowers passed down from mother to child that had somehow survived Brady’s violent outbursts and Brianna’s thoughts of suicide. It was a small detail, maybe even irrelevant in the larger scope. But having gotten to know both of them, I saw the love they have for one another in those photos.

The photos can be seen side by side in Charlotte’s tremendous story, which I encourage you to read.

What I want to share in this newsletter, though, is that photo of Brady on the bags of soil. It wasn’t until after the story was published that I looked at it again and was struck by the metaphor it presented.

On one side, you see Brianna working in her garden, where the dahlias she planted and cared for tower over her. On the other, you see Brady, another product of Brianna’s love and care, basking in the sun, literally planted on a bag of soil.

FINN WENDT: I write this one day removed from wrapping up CDN’s World Cup coverage with veteran sports/outdoors reporter Elliott Almond.

I can still feel the contact high of sitting on a field with 22 of the best athletes in the world, surrounded by tens of thousands of raucous fans. We put in hundreds of miles driving Interstate 5 for seven of the 13 matches delegated to Vancouver and Seattle, with Elliott picking the most culturally significant ones to both our region and the sport.

One of the best parts for me as a photographer was the three major camera brands loaning gear to journalists. We have capable gear here at CDN, but to take a few pro-grade lenses (namely Canon’s 400mm f/2.8 and 600mm f/4) and the newest-generation bodies for a spin was epic. It’s true that gear doesn’t make the photographer, but man, it sure does help.

Across those seven games, I took 30,918 photos and filed 198 of them. That’s a 0.6% keeper rate if you’re doing the math at home. That may sound terrible, and that rate is indeed far lower than if I were photographing a feature story, but when you factor in that I’m taking bursts of action at 12 frames per second, it makes sense. I think coming away with about a 30-image gallery per game as a single photographer was a pretty good output.

Read more about my experience covering the World Cup next week online and in print.

SANTIAGO OCHOA: A photojournalist's schedule is a crazy thing. I'm sure at this point I've worked every hour of the day. Still, I cannot imagine dedicating three or four hours every night for months to rehearsing the same songs and dances. That's what the cast and crew of "In the Heights" have been doing since May, and it really shows.

I visited them multiple times during rehearsal and saw a loose semblance of similar steps, sways and lifts transform into a colorful and boldly executed series of musical sequences worthy of Lin-Manuel Miranda's legendary celebration of Nuevayorkian Latinidad.

A cast and crew of more than 20 packed into the New Prospect Theatre most nights of the week and put the house's air conditioning to work as they ran on and off stage, sticking to the walls and door frames of the dressing room to make room for other cast members running in the opposite direction. And trust me: this at-times clumsy photographer knows there is ALWAYS someone running through the doorway you've decided to stand in for the perfect shot.

You can read a more informative account of my time with Little Lemon Productions here, but stick around first and check out three of my favorite moments on and off stage:

Remarkably Bright Creatures: A grieving aquarium janitor builds a relationship with a resident octopus, but things start to change when a stranger stumbles into her tight-knit town in this movie based on a novel of the same name. It earns bonus points for being set in Washington, and based on geographic clues in the book and movie, the fictitious town of Sowell Bay could very well be our own Anacortes or La Conner, though neither has an aquarium.

Seattle Times’ World Cup photo team takes the pitch: A really neat look behind the curtain of how The Seattle Times dispatched nearly its full photo staff to cover each World Cup game day. Many times throughout the tournament, I was dying to be in multiple places at once, and with its resources, the Times was able to do exactly that.

The big ambitions in some of Montana’s smallest graduating classes: Montana Free Press multimedia journalist Lauren Miller spent months traveling to photograph, video and interview graduating seniors in some of the state’s smallest high schools. Many of these students are graduating alongside two or three of their peers; some are the only ones in their class. Lauren’s visuals and writing explore the effects that school closures and economic strain have on public school students and what it means to be on the verge of adulthood and to leave the only home you’ve ever known.