My first book authored came on the heels of a major milestone for a Texas institution...

Unless math fails me, they ought to be turning eighty-five this year. But this video and a book I wrote are a couple of items we put together and worked like madmen to get published largely during the month of September.

We somehow managed to pull it off while getting our regularly scheduled publications out the door and spending a full week on the road while covering the Hurricane Ike when it tore through East Texas and left half the state in darkness.

Nothing like deadlines bearing down to see what people are made of.

The book  was roughly a 100-page pictorial history of the organization, which made use of several great historical photos in combination with several more modern shots. As such, roughly of the third of the photos used were my own.

The color scheme, theme and many of the quotations by current and past leaders were shared between the book and the video. Although the book itself didn't garner any accolades by itself, one of my photos did. A single shot of boy bottle feeding a calf, taken a couple years prior during the making of profiles for the organization's annual Young Farmer & Rancher Award. The book gave me my first opportunity to publish it, and it garnered the 2009 Best Single Photograph Award from the national organization in Washington, D.C.






An abbreviated version of the book, published in both Texas Agriculture and Texas Neighbors, the organization's two major print publications. The video above ran as part of their television programming shown on the RFD-TV Network.

Those pages served as the Reader's Digest version of the book, written in the same style, design and format as the book, all of which was also complemented  by the video above.