Mike Yoder

From KU basketball fans celebrating a national championship to a young girl waiting for a liver transplant, my favorite images of 2008 cover a diverse subject matter. With each new subject or event, I’m pushed to capture creative images that communicate a story to the readers.

Richard Gwin

On the hay bale photo:

This particular summer day I thought, well, I’ll take another route, drive north of town and maybe look around. I got up toward the small towns of McLouth and Oskaloosa and I thought, there’s got to be something around here. Lo and behold, around the corner, a stack of round hay bales and two young girls and their dogs running back and forth across they hay bales. You couldn’t have found a better Kansas summer scene.

On the car chase photos:

We were sitting around the newsroom one afternoon, listening to a car chase out in western Douglas County. It didn’t sound like much of a car chase, but this lady kept leading area officers on, and it got longer and longer, and I thought, “well, OK, I’ll go out and look at this.”

I know most of the roads in Douglas County since I’ve been here for a long time, and Jonathan Kealing, one of our editors, I said to call me every 10 minutes and tell me which direction she’s going. Every 10 minutes he called, and I knew exactly where she was coming out. I headed out west toward Big Springs and I set myself up on a county road, and out she comes.

On the Cuba photos:

Another thing that I do, usually every year, is I wander off to the island of Cuba. I’ve been going there for the last 15 years, documenting what I see as a change in Cuba. There are two photographs I’m showing you. One an old man sitting on a countryside lane, a light rain across the pavement, and the buggies that they drive always interest me real well. The next photograph is a picture of children carrying a Cuban flag, with Camilo Cienfuegos and Che Guevara.

On the fox photos:

I spend a lot of time both on the clock and off the clock looking at wildlife. It’s a real peaceful thing to do. One day a lady calls me and tells me she sees a fox every evening about dusk. This fox has four to six kits who come out and play in the yard. She tells me where it is, and it’s about a block and a half from the paper. I just can’t believe this, because usually you hunt night and day for these kinds of things and they’re just hard to find.

The mother fox comes out and stands on the sidewalk and suns herself and looks around. One by one each kit comes out, sniffs the air, and they play and they roll and play and roll and play, all in the eye-view of a family looking out the window who sees this every day.

Nick Krug:

On the memorial photo:

This is definitely the most somber of the pictures that I’ve chosen for my photos of the year. What it depicts is the Griffith family gathered near the roadside memorial for Rolland Griffith and Tyrone Korte, the two workers who were hit and killed by the truck driven by Ramona Morgan. This came after a day of testimony, and I’d just spoken with members of the family afterward. The father had said that they had planned to go to the memorial, and just invited me to come along. I was very honored that they had asked me to do so.

On the Villanova photo:

In this photo, the Kansas Jayhawks are running a weave during their first practice at Ford Field prior to their game against Villanova. Basically what I was doing here was looking for any sort of angle, anything different than just people shooting a basket. I found that the floor had a reflective sort of quality, so I got down real low and shot across.

On the photo of Chalmers’ shot:

Without a doubt, my favorite photo of the year was Mario Chalmers’ three-point shot at the buzzer to send the national championship game into overtime. It’s a fun photo to revisit, because you can look throughout the crowd and see moments of hope and despair on the faces of everybody watching and the players.