documentary

2017 Year in Review

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.

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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Human Nature

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

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.

2015 Year in Review

Happy New Year! 2015 was a really great year. Here are a few highlights for me.

I grew up traveling all over the world, and it's been a goal of mine for a while to incorporate overseas assignments into my work as well. So, this year I was really thrilled to be able to spend two weeks in Nicaragua working on photo projects there.

I'm returning to Nicaragua this February to continue a project on a former gangster who is working with kids in his hometown to try and intervene in the cycle of gang violence.

During my travels in Nicaragua, I found out that I actually really like Instagram (my dad insisted that I post something online everyday so that he would know I was still alive). Taking pictures with my phone has been a great way for me to explore a completely different way of shooting.

As usual, this year Harvard Business School kept me busy with a whole slew of video projects, from creating video introductions for their Entrepreneurs in Residence to promoting some programs like their joint degree with the Harvard Kennedy School.

And in the spring I finished the very last piece of a video and portrait project I had been working on for Boston University School of Law. I really enjoyed the project because I was able to use both my photo and video skills and really exercise my creativity in putting it together.

During the summer, I had a lot of fun hanging out with kids in various summer school programs around the Boston area while producing some photo and video work for Boston After School & Beyond.

Also over the summer, I finally managed to finish editing my short documentary on the erosion issues on Plum Island. The film, Human Nature premiered at the Newburyport Documentary film festival in September.

In the fall I began shooting for MIT, which I've been enjoying a lot so far. I love the challenges and creative possibilities of environmental portraiture.

For 2016, I'm hoping for more of the same! I really enjoy the clients I've gotten to work with and the wide variety of assignments I've had. I'd love to do some more traveling and am hoping to find the time to work on one or two other personal projects as well.

'Human Nature' Screening

I'm excited that my short documentary film on Plum Island 'Human Nature' is finally complete and will be screening at the Newburyport Documentary Film Festival this weekend.
The film is 15 minutes long and is screening Sunday, September 20th at 11:30 AM in The Screening Room, 82 State St, Newburyport, MA 01950. It will be screened along with another short film. You can get tickets here.

Creating this film was a long difficult process for me as the story and issue are pretty complex and I was trying my best to accurately represent all sides. I feel good about the results though, and I'm looking forward to sharing the final product with the Newburyport community!

Synopsis: Plum Island is a barrier beach on the north shore of Massachusetts that people have inhabited, in one form or another, since the early 1800s. In the past few decades, people have built more conventional homes where dune shacks once stood. In 2013, a series of winter storms caused enough erosion damage to destroy six of these homes. Many outsiders see the people on the island as wealthy homeowners who built too close to the water and got what they deserved, but the truth is much more complicated.

Newburyport Documentary Film Festival

I was really fortunate to be able to screen a short clip from my Plum Island documentary (which is still a work in progress) at the Newburyport Documentary Film Festival this past weekend. The screening was part of a special section of the festival for works in progress and was screened alongside a film on Henry Beston. It was great to be able to show something to an audience and receive feedback and after a year and a half of working on this project it's definitely given me an extra boost of motivation to see the project through to the end.

Earth Port Film Festival

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to have a film screened at the Earth Port Film Festival in Newburyport, MA. The film, Rise and Fall, is one that I produced along with Lindsey Topham and Sarah Ganzhorn for the International Documentary Challenge about a year ago and it deals with the erosion issues on Plum Island, MA. It was great to be able to participate in the festival and meet other filmmakers who were also interested in highlighting environmental issues. You can watch interviews with me and some of the other filmmakers here: http://www.earthportfilm.org/ (start at 7:18 for my interview).

Our film 'Showered' will be screened at Hot Docs!

A few weeks ago I was on a team that participated in the International Documentary Challenge, a film competition where participants have to research, shoot and edit a short film within five days. This year's theme was "behind the curtain" which lead us to choose an interesting topic: we decided to interview people in the shower. Recently, we found out that our film made it into the top 12 for the competition and will be screened at the Hot Docs documentary film festival in Toronto on May 1st!

Unfortunately, it's not possible for us to publish the film online until it premieres at Hot Docs but you can watch the behind the scenes video and vote for our film in the Audience Awards!