non-profit

Another Women's Worth Trip

in ,

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.

2017 Year in Review

in , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

photo-1-23.jpg
photo-1-20.jpg
photo-1-19.jpg

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!

photo-1.jpg

Women's Worth

in ,

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.

photo-6.jpg
photo-14.jpg
photo-15.jpg

2016 Year in Review

in , , , , , , , , ,

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!

Summer Learning Project III

in ,

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.

2015 Year in Review

in , , , , , , , , ,

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.

Summer Learning Project II

in ,

This past summer I was really glad to get a chance to work with Boston After School & Beyond again to document some of their Summer Learning Project sites around the Boston area. The Summer Learning Project is a summer education program where students spend the mornings on academics and the afternoons on "enrichment activities", which can be anything from swimming, to gardening, to visiting animals at the zoo.

Micro-lending Portraits

in ,

While traveling in Nicaragua recently, I was fortunate to be able to do some work for a micro-lending non-profit there called People Helping People Global. They provide loans to small business owners in both Granada and Matagalpa and many of their borrowers are women. We traveled around to visit several borrowers in their homes and workplaces.

Summer Learning Project

in ,

This past summer I spent two weeks photographing Boston After School and Beyond's Summer Learning Project, a summer education program where students spend the morning on academics and the afternoon on a variety of activities. The program has 18 different sites around Boston and I bounced around to six of them trying to show off the unique characteristics of each.