Hamilton Township's 25th Annual Septemberfest was well-attended to say the least. If you don't know, it's a huge festival held in Veteran's Park featuring things like crafts, food, family fun, entertainment and a Baby Crawl Contest. These young, but tenacious athletes don't go to school and don't hold jobs, but they train for most of their lives for this competition. Parents will use any trick they can think of, bending the rules of fair play without hesitation, to cajole their future track star across the finish line ahead of the others.

The A.J. Meerwald, New Jersey's Tall Ship passes under the Burlington-Bristol Bride (the center section raises up) on a visit to the Burlington Riverfront Promenade. The 1928 oyster schooner will spend September 7 through 11 in Burlington, where she was officially designated New Jersey's Tall Ship by Governor Christine Whitman in 1998.

OK. You be the editor. Here are two different pictures from an assignment, the unveiling of a new logo on the ice at Sovereign Bank Arena. The Trenton minor league hockey team is now affiliated with the New Jersey Devils club. Do you have a preference?

This one:

Or this one:

Or how about turning it on its side?

OK, now you have to defend your decision. Wait a minute. I forgot. You're the editor. What you say, goes. No explanation necessary ;)

Last Sunday, I was assigned nothing but one baseball game, The Trenton Thunder, so I gave myself an assignment. The Red Cross was having a blood drive at St. Mary's Cathedral in Trenton. I thought that was an unusual place for a blood drive. Unfortunately, it wasn't in the church. but downstairs in the cafeteria. Oh well, looking for something interesting, I found a young mother with her child to focus on. As I was imagining what nice pictures would come of the little girl with her mother donating blood, the kid's grandmother took her away! Boo. Anyway, when the donating was done. I scurried for position while the donor's mother and daughter spontaneously showed their approval for what the woman had done. The next day I noticed a story on the wire saying that blood banks are seeking out donations from people of Latino heritage because it turns out that Latinos are more likely than the average American to have Type O blood, the type blood banks value most because it can be used by so many patients.

I had an assignment in Allentown NJ Monday and to me, that means a farm photo. I used to drive a mail truck through this area many years ago and it's hard to believe that a mere fifteen miles from the center of Trenton can look like the center of Iowa.

The annual Puerto Rican Day parade in Trenton is a blast to photograph. I've always worked Sundays so I've done it quite a few times (fifteen or twenty). This year's twist was I ran into a guy who went through grammar school and high school with my youngest son. (They're now in different colleges.) I talked with him a little and then took his picture, thinking I was just going to show it to my son, but with that big smile and him wrapped in the flag for protection from the sun, I decided to submit it and Ben wound up on the front page.

Hot weather is the story around these parts (the northeast). On my way back up north to Trenton from an assignment for a tomato tasting in South Jersey, I stopped at the Burlington waterfront ... and waited. In desperate times like these, when nobody is around doing anything to photograph, a photojournalist has to earn his keep using perspective, composition and other visual tricks to come up with something. So here it is, in the original form and the cropped b&w version that appeared in the paper.