Six inches of fresh snow atop a three-inch bed of solid ice put a chill on Friday’s Superbowl XLV crowds in Sundance Square where ESPN is headquartered. The sun played hide-and-seek for a couple of hours before emerging in the early afternoon to begin the thaw.

My client, The Dallas Morning News hired me to shoot a portrait of Texan of the Year nominee, Fort Worth city councilman, Joel Burns. Initially, I was to shoot the assignment at the Dallas Women’s Museum in Fair Park, but after arriving and talking with Burns we decided that shooting the photo in Fort Worth made more sense. It enabled us to select a location that was definitively Fort Worth.

Burns and I decided on the Fort Worth Water Gardens and met there in the early afternoon the following day to make the portrait. Burns, who is gay, was most recently in the news for speaking at an October 2010 council meeting about suicide among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender kids. As part of Dan Savage‘s It Gets Better campaign, Burns talked about his experiences as a gay youth in Crowley, Texas.

I sent the client three images, which did not include the horizontal photo posted here. I stepped away to retrieve a short telephoto lens and when I turned back toward Burns, he was busily texting–and had been most of the time we were together. Burns is a very busy man and I was grateful he took the hour out of his day to help with the portrait.

My favorite is the vertical.

Often, a subject is eager to get the photo over–largely because they, like many of us, hate being photographed and want to be done with it. This typically forces the photographer to make the best photo possible in three to five minutes. My all-time favorite news editor, Tom Gregory, of The Times-Picayune/States-Item, was fond of screaming at me on deadline saying “God dammit, Hart, where’s my photo? It only takes a 60th of a second to make a photograph.” I’d reply, “Yes Tom, but it takes at least twice that long to make a GOOD photograph.”

So when a subject actually engages and wants to help make a good photograph, it makes a huge difference. Burns was definitely the latter.

These and other images from The Robert Hart Studio are available in my searchable online archive:

In mid-October, on assignment for The Dallas Morning News, I shot photos of Irving, Texas residents whose yards were plowed up by a band of marauding wild hogs. In hopes of getting a photo of one of the hogs, I left my contact info with Fred La Vail, whose yard was among those destroyed–in Fred’s case, several times.

Three days later Fred called saying one of the hogs had been trapped a few blocks from his house. I contacted my editor at the DMN to let him know I was enroute. The Dallas Morning News was able to do a followup story and I was able to make my editor/client happy.

Recently The Wall Street Journal published a story on the Texas wild hog problem and featured Fred La Vail and his wife, Sharie, in the video.

According to “The Wall Street Journal” story, the hogs are tearing up lawns in Arlington and Southlake as well.

These and other images from The Robert Hart Studio are available in my searchable online archive:

Me and the lovely Jocelyn were making our way to Kasia’s Restaurant for brunch when we were overtaken by hundreds of Santas moving north down Driggs Ave. Like lemmings marching toward the sea, these Santas were on a mission, they had a destination and we fell in with them.

We learned that this was a gathering point for the 2009 NYC Santacon, Brooklyn edition. There are five gathering points for Gotham Santas and they’ll converge at one location later today, but it’s secret.

We continued along Driggs where we were met by converging Santas approaching from east and west. We passed McCarren Park and ended up at the Warsaw Polish National Home in Greenpoint at 261 Driggs Ave., where the Santas filed inside to get their secret marching/crawling orders. Since we weren’t Santas, we weren’t allowed inside.

We departed for Kasia’s only to learn that it’s closed on Saturdays??? So, down the block to Bagelsmith for fresh, custom-made bagels and hot coffee.

Tim Oren, managing director and co-founder of the Pacifica Fund, shared his thoughts on the future of reporting via his blog, Tim Oren’s Due Diligence: Letters From an Inhabited Dataspace.

As Yahoo and AOL morph into media companies that employ both reporters and editors, Oren makes some interesting points on the opportunities and the pitfalls of picking up where MSM is leaving off.

The Fort Worth City Council listened to several Fort Worth citizens, both gay and straight, describe their outrage and shock at the actions of the Fort Worth police and officers from the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission on the evening of June 28 during the raid at the Rainbow Lounge in Fort Worth, Texas.

Fort Worth mayor, Mike Moncrief, apologized at the close of the meeting, saying, “I am sorry for what happened in Fort Worth.” The crowd inside the council chamber responded with applause.

The police department has appointed officer Sara Straten, a 17-year veteran, as liaison to the city’s LGBT community.