PEAKLAND PRESCHOOL

Every spring, the students of Peakland Preschool in Lynchburg, VA look forward to witnessing the miracle of life. Or maybe they just get excited to hold baby chickens. Either way, it's a longstanding tradition that the school provides an incubator full of eggs for students to observe new life from first crack to final waddle down the hall before the chickens are adopted out to local farms.

(This series is part of my ongoing "grown-up field trips" project, which I've designed in order to put myself into as many unpredictable situations as possible. There are stories everywhere, and I want to practice telling them on the fly. My ultimate goal is to work as a White House photographer, and I'm following the 10,000 hours philosophy to make it happen. I cannot feasibly log that many hours of photographing heads of state right now, but the most appealing part of a White House job for me is the idea of being thrown into the unknown and being challenged to tell stories and capture details in real time. So *that* is what I'm pushing myself to do as often as I can. I love the adrenaline rush of documenting the unknown and unexpected. For me, it is fulfilling in a way nothing else is; it absolutely feels like what I was made to do on this earth.)