10th Anniversary post

Today marks the 10th anniversary of my Midwest indy wrestling photo blog. Wow, that's a long time! Before this blog I was posting photos on Live Journal for about a year or two. I can't remember why but I switched to Bloger.com as a place to post my photos.  I started off with a photo of the MPW "This one, is for the fans" DVD cover that featured my photos from that event.

Since that time this blog has served as a history of all the matches that I have photographed in the Midwest states including Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and North Dakota. I've photographed at ringside at promotions such as F1RST Wrestling, TNA, ROH, Chikara, HOW, 3XW, MIW, AAW, Dragon Gate USA, NIW, RUSH, SDW, IWA-MS, AWF, BCW, IPW PTW and BCW. I've also photographed ringside at WWE events but those photos have not been posted here as PWI has the copyright.

I changed the header image that you see above to feature an photo from every year of this blog. 2006-Arik Cannon/Roderick Strong from IWA-MS, 2007- Sara Del Rey from ROH, 2008 Thoruf Marius (WWE's Erick Rowen)/Dakota Darsow from AWF, 2009- Petey Williams from ECHO Pro, 2010- Tyler Black (WWE's Seth Rollins)/AJ Smooth from IPW, 2011-Johnny Gargano from F1RST, 2012- Casanova from 3XW, 2013- UDO from PTW, 2014- Bob Holly/Luke Hawx from HOW and 2015- Chuck Taylor from Chikara.

I wish I had stats of how many matches I've photographed in the past 10 years and posted here. That would take way too much time. One stat I can give you is the top 10 countries that have that have visited this blog. 10. Australia 9. Ukraine 8. Poland 7. Russia 6. Japan 5. Canada 4. United Kingdom 3. Germany 2. France 1. United States of America

I stated taking photos ringside back in 1993 thanks to Mark Peterson, the man pictured next to me on the left. Peterson was the main photographer here in the Minneapolis area back in the early '90's. I met him at the PWA events at Ropers/Georges in Fridley, MN. He allowed be to shot at ringside with him at these PWA events and instructed me in the ways of wrestling photography. Had I never met Mark I don't think I would have ever photographed pro wrestling events at ringside, taken posed photos of wrestlers that were used for 8x10's and posters or seen my photos in print in Pro Wrestling Illustrated, Inside Wrestling and The Wrestler. Thank you Mark Peterson!
 Mark Peterson and I at a Prime Time Wrestling event at Calhoun Square in the summer of 2015.