2018 Year in Review

Happy New Year! Although sometimes the start to the new year can feel a little anticlimactic after the build up of the holiday season, I really enjoy taking advantage of the slower pace of things to reflect on the previous year. Here are a few highlights for me…

I started off the year with a somewhat epic trip to Oregon, embarking on a road trip that covered nearly half the state with a detour into northern California as well. See the full set of images here.

Later on in the year, I headed down to Nicaragua to see how things had been going with the nonprofit we started last year and to collect some more photos and video. I had the opportunity to interview many of the women we’ve been working with and was really pleased to hear how valuable they’ve found our workshops. See more images from my trip here or click here to learn more about our nonprofit.

In the spring, I continued to work with the Broad Institute, where I always enjoy the challenge of finding creative ways t make new and different portraits of those involved in research. See more examples here.

Continuing my tradition of photographing schoolchildren, I started working with another new client in the spring, the Young Achievers Science and Math Pilot School. I spent time photographing the students both indoors and out. See more of the images here.

During the summer, I was excited to get an assignment from Yankee Magazine to work on a story about a nonprofit that works with girls who have lost their mothers. See more images from that job here.

As the year came to a close, I decided to continue my tradition of finding a place to watch the sunrise to welcome in the new year. This year I ended up on one of the beaches of Cape Cod. Next year, who knows…

empowerHER for Yankee Magazine

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I was really pleased to be noticed by Yankee Magazine earlier this year because of the ongoing work I’ve been doing on women in Nicaragua. They asked me to photograph a story on women a little closer to home. Cara Belvin, a local of Scituate, MA, runs empowerHER, a nonprofit which works with girls who have lost their mothers. I got to spend the afternoon with Cara and some of the girls at a house in Beverly. You can read the full story here.

Young Achievers

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One of my favorite things to do the past few summers has been photographing some of the children in summer school programs around the Boston area. It’s not a bad day at work when you get to hang out with kids all day, particularly when it’s outside. This year I started working with a new client, Young Achievers Science Math and Pilot School, where I photographed their students both in the Boston Nature Center as well as their regular classrooms.

Broad Institute Portraits

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This spring I was back at the Broad Institute again for another round of portraits, this time to photograph a group of new research fellows. I always enjoy working here as it’s a fun challenge to take a standard lab or office setting and try to do something different with it each time.

Cancer Doctor for Discover Magazine

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This past December, I was sent on a bit of an unusual assignment to photograph a doctor at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Tracy Balboni works in end of life care at Dana-Farber as well as the Harvard Medical School. What makes her unusual is how her religious faith ties into her practice as a doctor. This lead to an assignment where I not only photographed the doctor at the hospital, but also spent time with her in her home while she and her family and friends gathered for an intimate prayer meeting. You can read the full story here.

Another Women's Worth Trip

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This spring I headed down to Nicaragua for another trip to work with Women’s Worth, a nonprofit organization a friend and I founded in 2017 to teach business skills to low-income women. The trip was shorter than usual, I was only in the country for a week, but it was, as always, a whirlwind of wonderful experiences as I got to meet, photograph and interview many of the women we’ve been working with and see how our programs have helped them begin to transform their lives.

Winter Hiking in Oregon

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I decided to start 2018 off with a two week trip to Oregon to do some winter hiking and check out the amazing variety of landscapes the state has to offer. One of the most epic trips I've been on in a long time and I'll definitely have to go back.

2017 Year in Review

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Happy New Year! The past year feels like it's been a bit of a whirlwind and all gone by so quickly. Here are a few highlights from my year.

I began the year by heading down to Nicaragua for three weeks to put together the photo/video material we would need to launch our newly founded nonprofit Women's Worth. This organization is based in Matagalpa, Nicaragua and teaches business skills to low-income women. We were planning on running a fundraiser in the spring and so we needed photography for the website, video footage for our fundraising video, plus portraits and food photography for a cookbook we were creating as a giveaway. You can see more images as well as our fundraiser video here.

Meeting all of the women we worked with, learning about their lives and and their businesses was a really inspiring experience and I'm looking forward to continuing to work more on this organization in the years to come.

After spending only a few days back in the States from the Nicaragua trip, I was off on another three week trip, this time to India. The trip was more of a personal one than for work, though I did manage to fit in a video project on a tribal woman who creates traditional floor paintings (more on that to come). For the rest of the time though, I relied on my iPhone for a lot of my photography, something I've come to really enjoy doing in recent years.

photo by Varsha Yeshwant Kumar

When I returned from India in the spring, I was really pleased to finally have a photo story from Nicaragua that I had been working on published in the Christian Science Monitor. The story was on Jairo Blanchard, a former gang member who had turned his life around and started an organization which works with at-risk youth. You can read the full story here and see the full set of pictures here.

Later on in the spring, I had the opportunity to work with Boston University's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department to produce a video on their program. It was really fascinating to see the different types of technology students are working with these days.

Throughout a lot of the rest of the year, I did a number of editorial shoots and picked up a few new clients along the way. I really enjoy editorial work as it's a great opportunity to be creative while trying to have a person's personality come through in the image. Subjects ranged from a computational biologist, to the Fenway organist to everything in between.

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One of these editorial shoots lead to a new client, and I ended up doing a number of portraits of the Broad Institute's executive leadership along with some images of one of their new core members and his lab.

And as always, every year I enjoys spending my summers working with Boston After School & Beyond to document their summer learning programs.

I'll be starting off 2018 with a trip to Oregon for some winter hiking/camping excursions. After that, who knows where I'll end up... You can follow my travels on my Instagram where I hope to have lots of new images to share with you soon. Have a great new year!

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Fenway Organist

I ended up with one of my favorite types of assignments recently while shooting for a new client, an online magazine called Atlas Obscura. They sent me to Fenway Park for a story on the Fenway organist. Having been to Fenway Park only a handful of times, I was unaware that there even was an organist, much less one who takes requests via Twitter! Needless to say, the shoot was a lot of fun with my camera, once again, affording me a backstage pass. You can read the full story here.

Summer Learning Project IV

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Another year’s worth of pictures shot for Boston After School & Beyond of their various summer school programs. Each year I end up in different locations and it’s been really interesting to see the wide variety of educational experiences these kids get throughout the Boston area.

Women's Worth

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This past year I decided to get involved in a different kind of project. I’ve made a couple of trips to Nicaragua over the past couple years to visit a friend, do some work for a nonprofit and work on some personal projects. My friend finally decided that she wanted to branch out from the organization she was working for and start her own nonprofit. Having become involved in a lot of the work she was doing, I jumped onboard to help and we decided to start Women’s Worth, an organization which teaches business skills to low income women.

This past January, I spent three weeks in the country collecting the photo and video footage we would need for our online fundraising campaign, as well as collecting recipes from many of the women in order to produce a cookbook. Many of the women that we work with produce food out of their homes as their business, and it’s our idea to gather their recipes into a cookbook of traditional Nicaraguan recipes to help support the work that we’re doing with Women’s Worth.

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2016 Year in Review

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Happy New Year! I really enjoyed 2016 and have a bunch of new developments in my photo and video work to share.

I started the year off heading down to New York City to tag along and film some footage of one of Harvard Business School's Immersive Field Courses. Every year, HBS student take off for various locations around the world to take part in this experience and my footage from New York was incorporated into the final overview video.

In February, I headed off on another trip to Central America. I returned to Nicaragua to continue working on my photo story on a former gang member who now works with kids.

While in Nicaragua, I also continued my tradition of posting to Instagram once a day and built up a great collection of images. I was really pleased when a selection of iPhone shots from my travels was recently published on the website Passion Passport. You can read the full story here: http://passionpassport.com/central-america-by-iphone/

After Nicaragua, I continued on to El Salvador, where I worked with Ian MacLellan to film a video for the non-profit Epilogos. Epilogos has a wonderful story. It was started by a couple, Mike and Susie Jenkins who returned to El Salvador after being stationed there in the Peace Corps and lived and worked in the community of San Jose Villanueva for 14 years.

Working in El Salvador was a wonderful experience and it was great to get a chance to experience a different country in Central America. The people were very friendly and welcoming but it was heartbreaking to see the level of violence they are forced to deal with in their daily lives.

When I returned to Boston in the spring, I had a lot of fun shooting a whirlwind of events for MIT as they celebrated 100 years in Cambridge.

And throughout the year, I've continued to shoot portraits of students and faculty for MIT News, assignments which I always enjoy.

During the summer, I put some serious effort into adding to my travel portfolio and had a lot of fun shooting in Maine, New Hampshire and on Cape Cod.

And for the third year now, I got to spend a good portion of the summer hanging out with kids while shooting summer school photos for the non-profit Boston After School & Beyond.

Towards the end of the summer, I really enjoyed taking a trip up to Contoocook, New Hampshire to produce a video on a liturgical candlemaker who had gotten into beekeeping.

In the fall, during the run-up to the election I shot videos on a range of political topics for both the Edward M. Kennedy Institute and Moveon.org.

I'm starting off 2017 by heading first to Nicaragua to do some photo/video work for a new non-profit I've become involved with called Women's Worth. And then I'll be spending the month of February traveling in India. You can follow my travels on my Instagram where I hope to have lots of new images to share with you soon. Have a great new year!

Human Nature

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I'm please to finally be able to make Human Nature, my short documentary on Plum Island, available online. I initially started the project in the spring of 2013 and it was screened at the Newburyport Documentary Film Festival a year ago in the fall. The film explores the issue of erosion on Plum Island and how the various people involved are trying to deal with the situation.

Be the Bee

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This past summer, I traveled up to Contoocook, New Hampshire to spend a day with Martin Marklin, a liturgical candlemaker who has started keeping bees as a sideline. Although Martin can't hope to produce enough wax through his beekeeping hobby to contribute to his candlemaking business, he has learned a great deal from observing the bees, and believes the beehive can serve as a metaphor for life in the Christian community.

Summer Learning Project III

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This past summer marks my third year taking photos for Boston After School & Beyond's Summer Learning Project, a summer education program with sites all over the Boston area, where students spend the morning on academics and the afternoon on a variety of activities. I always enjoy getting to spend my summers with the kids and looking for new pictures in the various classroom settings.

Summer Hiking in the White Mountains

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This past summer I went with some family friends on an annual hiking trip through the White Mountains. Although it rained the first day of our trip we had beautiful weather the rest of the time with wonderful views, sunrises, sunsets and a chance to get out of the city and see the stars!