September 2011
1 post
June 2011
1 post
San Salvador Pride Parade - Marcha del Orgullo...
April 2011
1 post
The Outcomes Project: Terry's Story: Frozen in... →
Hey guys. Long time no post. But I’m getting back into the swing of things. Here’s a small piece from something I’ve been working on. (~1,000 words, click through to read)
outcomesproject:
Terry, now 37, grew up in Michigan, in a small town of a few thousand people called Caro. As Terry describes it, being gay in this isolated and conservative enclave was a terrifying...
April 2010
3 posts
New skills: computer science, journalism and...
Many of you know Donna DeCesare, documentary photographer and professor of photojournalism at the University of Texas at Austin. It was my privilege to recently work on her website, “Destiny’s Children,” a project that has been in the works for a few years now. I coded the website from scratch in Flash, adapting assets that had been developed for the project by a graphic...
Department of Catching Up
So it’s been a full season since my last update. Snow’s fallen and melted; I’ve gone ahead and moved to Brooklyn.
I apologize for not posting with greater regularity; of late I seem to have taken a break from shooting to write an iPhone app. It has been a season of significant change.
Over the next couple of posts, I want to catch up with updates on some what I’ve been...
January 2010
1 post
Audio Post: Master photographer Dennis Stock,...
December 2009
2 posts
November 2009
1 post
Rhythms; fifty seconds. No editing save for a fade...
October 2009
3 posts
Lit Break: House of Leaves
A couple of weeks ago, when I finished my site redesign, I rewarded myself with a book. For at least a year and a half now I’ve been on a nonfiction binge, and I really wanted to read a novel. So I ended up with a book called “House of Leaves” by Mark Z. Danielewski. It’s developed something of a reputation for its occasionally esoteric layout and multiple frenetic voices,...
September 2009
2 posts
SoundBoard
OK, as promised, a brief overview of the cool thing I created for the site. It’s the thing at the bottom right of the website, a little widget called SoundBoard.
SoundBoard is a controller for sounds; it can fade them up and down, it can remove them and add them, load them, etc. The reason I like it is, it reveals something visual about what you’re hearing; it takes an invisible...
Department of Website Redesigns
Finally! After a couple of false starts and more than a few headaches, my website is done.
The notable new project is India In Between. Previously, there was a story about a community of basket weavers in the northeast; it included a large pile of text and some photos. That was never my “complete” India project. The complete project only existed as a book I made and passed around;...
August 2009
3 posts
on the waterfront
Three from the Girl Talk show that went down there yesterday.
Bonus: my Twitter review of the show. Only took 113 characters.
Department of Experimental Flash Interfaces
I spent most of the last month at News21 working on a new sort of interface for video stories. Before I go any further, I want to stress the limitations: 1, the video runs too long; 2, I didn’t get most of my stills into it by deadline; and 3, it’s still a bit buggy; when the coordinators get back from their break I’m going to push out some fixes.
Having said that, I think...
July 2009
5 posts
get the point
Two from Charlie’s.
and why the hell not, a third. There’s no point to this one:
face up
As a side thing in the News21 project, I’m shooting photos for a group reporting on trends among mixed-race Americans. Here are four.
party break
Took a break to dance my ass off. Special thanks to Drew and Charlie for dj’ing a kickass set.
June 2009
2 posts
The Voter Outreach
After my day and a half in Allensworth, I was partnered with another News21 fellow, Nick McClellan, working the photographic angle on his story about Latino political engagement in Fresno County, CA. Here are a few shots from the morning we spent with a group called SOL that registers and organizes Latino voters.
Lingering on the porch; before you can change the world, someone needs to unlock...
What's in Allensworth?
A couple of things have shifted since my last post. For one, I’m now at News21, the Carnegie-Knight Initiative for the Future of Journalism. That lasts through August. So now I’m technically based out Maryland, but I’m currently on assignment in California. Yeah, I know. It happens.
Anyway, here are five photos from something I’m working on. If any of my News21 fellows...
May 2009
6 posts
Raw Sound: “Home on the Range,” performed at the...
Department of Getting Things Done
A while back, I went to the Texas-Mexico border with Drew to work on a story. I did the sound; Drew did the pictures. That story hadn’t been published; but now it has.
There are some things that, looking back, I would have done differently. But then, we learn and grow, and anything done with the skills you learned yesterday could be done perhaps better with the skills you’ll learn...
Of squash blossoms, aphids, life, death and...
News from the Garden: Squash Blossoms, 8 May 2009.
The first two leaves that pricked up from the surface spent the last couple of weeks in the shade; they’ve since shriveled and died, their purpose fulfilled. So now we have these big, yellow flowers, unfurling their floppy petals. In a few weeks’ time, these too will shrivel and fall; every thing that lives, likewise dies.
Also, the flower in...
April 2009
8 posts
Things Grow
[large version here; or just click the fullscreen button above]
I threw this together in an hour just now because I have work all week and I’m not gonna have a chance to post a more put together version for a while. I feel as though it’s a recurring theme on this blog, “I’ll post something better later,” “a more substantive post will have to wait.”...
Poetry break
in reply to Bruno, and in the spirit of remixing William Carlos Williams, a poem for Rod Blagojevich via Politico:
This is just to hold a press conference to announce I have filled the Senate seat that it was in my power to fill and which you were probably saving for Quinn Forgive me it was a $(*)ing valuable thing so sweet and so *(^)ing golden
The Things We Can Do
The surgery went well. Better than I could have imagined. I laid down unable to see shapes; then stood up ten minutes later, able to read the time on the clock across the room.
We have this phrase that we throw around, “the miracle of modern medicine.” It’s a true enough thing, and yet until you experience it, it’s just a platitude. For my part, my vision now looks...
burning of the eyes with lasers
I’m nearsighted. My vision corrects to 20/20 with glasses, but without them I’m a mess. Up close I can see fine; but put anything further than six inches from my face and I’m blind. I have trouble explaining how bad my vision is, so a couple weeks ago, at the Greenbelt, I did an experiment. I took a picture, deliberately out of focus, then took off my glasses and compared. After...
What I've Been Doing
Feels as though it’s been a while since I posted last. What have I been doing? Freelance work; that’s not going up on the blog. I’ve been doing the News21 class, which is less than visual:
and a whole lot of this, which actually is visual; trust me for now:
I’ve also been doing some real work. (photo by mom; that’s me on the right.)
Did SXSW a lil’ bit;
...
March 2009
4 posts
Financial Times: The audacity of help →
This is one of the most insightful things I’ve read all week. Free registration is required; but I’ve pasted three of the most salient paragraphs below:
As recently as the Democratic primaries, economic inequality did not seem to work as a central campaign theme. Americans’ reluctance to vote according to their apparent class interests became a truism of politics and a source of...
[Audio post; excerpt from A Prairie Home...
February 2009
3 posts
Retoning the new year; rethinking the last.
New year’s night, before:
and after:
I think better. I also think lesson: never leave your camera on Vivid while shooting JPEGs. Bitch of a time taming that saturation.
New topic: I went to the Sebastião Salgado show at AMoA [PDF link] yesterday. It’s very significant work that arguably has more resonance right now than ever before. Some photographs also had special meaning to...
January 2009
10 posts
Poetry Session: For A Printing Press
When I visited New York recently, I picked up a copy of Gordon Parks’ 1968 monograph, “A Poet and His Camera” at the Strand bookstore.
It’s a simple collection of poems and photographs, and it reminded me of a simple lesson: not all journalism comes in the AP style, and prose need hold no monopoly on the telling of truths. On that note:
—
For A Printing Press
The song of...
WatchAs long as we’re in the mode of pointing to other people’s stuff: here’s a video of Eli Reed from the CBS Early Show on Friday morning. A quote I love, about a photo shot from a low angle: ”If you wanna photograph children well, you gotta get to where they live.”
As an aside: the other night I mentioned to Caleb my “18 Lessons from Eli Reed.” Backstory:...
Reading List: Inauguration '09
So I wasn’t able to leave the house for yesterday’s big day. I got sick at the least opportune moment in history, and my whole week’s been characterized by far too much bed rest and ibuprofen. I’m unsure of when I’ll be back at full speed.
In the meantime, I’m gonna borrow a page from Eliot and point to the awesome inauguration coverage from some of the...
Contact Sheet: Martin Luther King Day
March along Martin Luther King Dr. in San Antonio, Texas. January 19, 2009.
This is also a cool new feature I wanna try out: Behind this link is the contact sheet of photographs leading up to and immediately following this frame, and some brief comments (audio, so turn up the volume) about how I arrived at this image.
Lemme know if this is interesting or not; much like the video-blog format,...
