Another Women's Worth Trip

April 01, 2018 in non-profit, travel

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

January 12, 2018 in documentary, editorial, education, films, iPhone, landscape, non-profit, personal, photojournalism, projects, travel, research

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 — *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.

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!

Where kids in Nicaragua can grow

May 01, 2017 in documentary, photojournalism

I’m really please that the project I’ve been working on for a while on a former Nicaraguan gang member has finally been published in the Christian Science Monitor. Here’s a link to the article on their website for easier reading and you can see more images here.

Women's Worth

March 01, 2017 in non-profit, travel

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.

Back to Nicaragua and then on to El Salvador

March 31, 2016 in personal, travel, iPhone

Having enjoyed my time in Nicaragua so much last year, I decided to return for a second trip this year to continue a photo project I began last time (more to come on that later) and continue exploring the country.

Here are a few snapshots from my trip...

After Nicaragua, I continued on to El Salvador to do some video work for a non-profit based in San Jose Villanueva, just south of the capital, San Salvador.

Here are a few images from my time there...