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As I rode the Salem Red Sox elevator to the press box a fellow passenger asked me, "What is that?"

And as I rode back down to make my way to the dugout, a pre-teen boy stared at me in wonder as he asked "Is that...?"

"A lens," I said.

Even a Salem Red Sox player seemed intrigued with the lens I was carrying around as he stopped to look through the eyepiece as he made his way from the dugout to the bullpen during Sunday night's game.

When we are on assignment at sporting events we often get asked questions about our cameras, lenses and any other gear we might be carrying. But the best questions seem to come when we are carrying the largest lens we share as a staff. The Canon 400 telephoto.

Between innings a rather loud sports enthusiast took a break from heckling to ask me, "So, do you think that thing is big enough? What does it weigh, 20 pounds?"

Actually it weighs 12, according to our photo department scale.

And yes, I can see to the moon with it.

Honor-system tomatoes. New football coaches. A brutal double homicide.

It's the Week in Photos.  View past weeks.

"How exactly did you get hit by a paintball gun at work?" a nurse asked me as I made my way through the Occupational Medicine hallway.

"Well, I am a photographer for The Roanoke Times," I said.

One of the greatest things, and sometimes painful things, about being a photojournalist is that we are in the middle of the action. I am lucky to be able to say that I have been up in a hot air balloon and a helicopter while simply doing my job. More painful experiences would include getting kicked in the head while photographing a bowler ( a story for another time) and being hit six times by paintballs. Four on the right shoulder, one on the left forearm and finally one in the head.

As I stood in the middle of a holler in Troutville and watched men hide behind bunkers and aim for one another I knew there was potential of being hit, but a picture taken safely from up on the hillside just wouldn't do.

Around 3:30 in the afternoon as I watched Jeremiah Keeler climb the side of a hill and position himself to shoot I felt a stinging sensation on my right side, and in my head. I looked down to see orange paint and heard Keeler yell, "Hey man, she's just trying to take pictures!"

I continued to photograph the rest of the game....while hiding behind a bunker.

I decided to go to the doctor when my headache didn't go away the next afternoon, but realized that my pain would be worth the story in the end.

As the doctor looked into my ear and literally told me my brains were not leaking out he excitedly asked me where people were playing paintball. Apparently, his sons are huge fans of the game and haven't had anywhere to play. I told him I couldn't remember the phone number off the top of my head at that moment, but that he could keep a lookout for the story in the Roanoke Times Extra section.

Ahhh.  Another campaign season.  I've been doing this long enough now that it seems like we're always following some sort of campaign.

This is an outtake from a project I'm currently pursuing on Creigh Deeds, the Democratic candidate for governor here in the Commonwealth.  It most likely won't make the final edit, but I'm into the contrasting colors and the random hand.  (Why do we young photographers like random hands in our photos?)  It was captured at the one-and-only Texas Tavern.

Folks working there said, "We just thought he was coming by.  We didn't know there was going to be all this media here."

Three TV cameras and me.

I informed them that a candidate never does anything that random.  It's all part of a script to win.

A Creigh Deeds supporter hangs signs in the Texas Tavern in Roanoke.

At exactly "lat=37.56572, lon= -79.48064," south of Natural Bridge Station, Sam Clifford dives head-first off the high rocks into the cold waters, followed fearlessly by his 10-year-old son, Leo. Sam, on vacation from Alexandria, wanted to show Leo and his cousin Norman the place where he swam as a young boy.

"It's one of my favorite things to do is come swimming with the boys. I take time off of work and we come out here and go camping and swimming. It's a great family thing to do. It's kind of like being at nature's amusement park. This is it. This is my favorite part of summer."

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