September 11th has a special meaning to Boston because two of those fatal flights left from Boston Logan Airport. Personally, before moving here and working at the Globe, I didn’t give much thought to that because of my own personal ties to New York City. We have some really compelling stories in the works from people who have experienced a lot of change or who have never told their story before.
In the meanwhile, we’ve been running other related stories leading up to our big 9/11 package that runs for 8 days beginning next Sunday, Sept. 4.
This story, which was shot by staff photographer Joanne Rathe (while also shooting beautiful stills) and I edited, offers a look into America’s Camp, a youth summer camp in Massachusetts that caters to kids who lost their parents on September 11, 2001. This is the 10th and last year for the camp, so the kids — many of whom were only about 5 or 8 years old at the time — are dealing with the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 and the end of the camp that helped them through so much emotional duress. These kids are so articulate and reflective about what they’ve gone through and how they’ve coped with their tragic losses at such young ages, it was really tough to whittle down.
In the Globe video department, we’ve been pretty deeply immersed in preparing stories for our 9/11 10th anniversary package that launches next week. But, I was able to take a lighthearted break from some solemn storytelling to shoot this awesome Red Bull event at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.
World-renowned cliff divers competing in the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series dove off the rood of the ICA building into the Boston Harbor. Pretty epic, to say the least!
I went to Spain at the end of April to visit my dear friend Emily Yount. She has been living in southern Spain since September, teaching English in a small farming community outside of Sevilla. I chose the week before Easter because, more than anything, I wanted to photograph Semana Santa in Sevilla:
“During Holy Week, the city is crowded with residents and visitors, drawn by the spectacle and atmosphere. The impact is particularly strong for the Catholic community. The processions are organized by hermandades and cofradÃas, religious brotherhoods. During the processions, members precede the pasos (of which there are up to three in each procession) dressed in penitential robes, and, with few exceptions, hoods. They may also be accompanied by brass bands.”
Unfortunately, it rained throughout the week. According to this article, no one can remember a year when this many pasos have been canceled in one Easter week.
A sad sight: chairs all set up and no paso to watch.
We spent a lot of the week hunting Nazarenos — the hermanos from the brotherhoods who act as the penitents wearing robes and masks — and documenting how they are “just like us”!
They find safety in numbers.
They wait for the bus.
They wait out the rain under a bridge.
But, with Easter Sunday also came the sun — if I were a religious person, I might say it was appropriate, or make some kind of pun (Son/sun?) — and we were able to watch a pretty epic, and crowed, paso. You could tell that everyone had a bit of “paso fever” since they had waited all week to attend one!
Pictures:
You can check out the whole set of images from the Domingo de ResurreccÃon paso HERE!.
In between the time I was waiting for iPhone videos to compress, export and upload, I was able to shoot some stills during the start and finish of the 2011 Boston Marathon.
Here are some scenes from Hopkinton and everyone looking cold but spritely that morning…
When I got to the finish in Copley Square, I posted up just past the finish line, where people walk off the race and seek sustenance and loved ones, some more successfully than others. The general sentiment was a combination of relief, pain and pure joy…
My first experience covering the Boston Marathon for The Globe, and my challenge was to use only an iPhone. I shot, edited and posted videos from the field using only that device, while also tweeting pictures (when I could remember to). My synopsis: It brings multitasking to a new, almost debilitating, extreme.
Here are some of the videos that made it to Boston.com:
In general, it was a great learning experience. The iPhone is the perfect tool for event coverage because you can do so much with just one device while you’re in the field. Slow 3G mobile service was an issue, as well as battery life. I wasn’t able to publish from the athlete’s village because of poor service and then I almost missed the start of the women’s elite race because I needed to charge the battery.
The editing software could also be a bit less clunky. I really take pride in the polish of each video I produce and you just can’t polish with the available software for the iPhone. But really, making highly produced videos isn’t what the iPhone is for. It’s for getting decent content up fast, so it helped to remind myself of that when shooting. I used an app called ReelDirector, which I hear is better than iMovie, but it is very basic, requires several steps of processing and compression to select and trim clips (so, lots of waiting, relative to clip length, so keep your recording time short!). I really just wish it would allow for more precise trimming — it only lets you cut on each second, which in video can be an eternity. Adding titles and lower thirds couldn’t be easier, though, and they look pretty slick.
I found the best use for the iPhone was to shoot one thing, like the start of one of the race waves, put a Globe bumper on it, export, and have it posted to the website within 5 minutes. Attempting to edit interviews and build a story can feel as taxing as shooting with my 7D, transcoding, editing and publishing, but condensed into one little stress block. It’s good for one quote or one piece of action. Maybe 3 clips, simply strung together with iMovie or ReelDirector, and then move on.
Content gathering with the iPhone can also be very difficult because you can’t compartmentalize: I’m shooting video right now, I’m shooting pictures right now, then I’m going somewhere and will just edit everything. Instead it was: I’m shooting video, while editing video, while taking pictures, while tweeting pictures, while attempting to make a pano and decide if the quality is good enough to post, while answering emails and text messages (I was carrying 3 types of phones), while keeping track of failed uploads, etc. As much as I tried to shoot then edit then post, there was just too much and not enough going on at the same time. I think this is where keeping it simple really comes in. DON’T COLLECT. I think that was my downfall, because the content becomes just too hard to keep track of. Just create and post, create and post.
What helped enormously, in a technical way, was this:
An iPhone audio rig by OWLE. It is made of metal which adds weight and reduces shake while hand-holding the iPhone. It also creates a mount for a microphone or light, adds a wide-angle adapter for the camera lens and provides a place for a tripod cleat. Lots of people were interested in what I had going on there (including this guy, who came up to me to see the rig and I got all flustered. He was running the race.).
But honestly, because it was a sunny and cold morning, I just found it challenging to review and edit my clips, to use the touch screen with cold hands, and also to use other features like shooting panoramic pictures. It was just too hard to see the screen in bright daylight!
All in all, it was a decent experience. I learned a lot about how to best use the device, its strengths and weaknesses, and I look forward to the next opportunity to use the iPhone to its full potential.
This was my first really fun project since starting at the Globe. I collaborated with staff photographer Yoon Byun to create this video about the Celtics super fans, who have become famous at the TD Garden for their antics on the megatron. Yoon shot portraits of each and I shot interviews and b-roll to put together this feature.
Although this is the kind of project that I would love to spend a couple weeks on to perfect and really let the creative juices flow, I was on deadline. Shot and transcoded Wednesday night, done by Friday afternoon. Newspapers, right!
I shot all of the video on a Canon 7D (for the interviews I used my Nikon 55mm macro that I love). Audio was a challenge because we had to set up the 9-foot green backdrop right in the middle of the concourse in the TD Garden. It was loud. I used a wired lav connected to my Zoom H4N, synced in post using Pluraleyes (aka: the greatest app ever created), and the audio ended up being not only usable but really high quality. Yoon and I needed different light set-ups, so we alternated: portraits, interview, interview, portraits. Pretty flawless.
Eric Moskowitz also wrote a great story that tied everything together. Hoo-rah, multimedia teams, bridging the gap between print and online!
FULL CREDITS:
Camera and sound: Lauren Frohne
Additional camera: Sopan Deb
Portraits: Yoon S. Byun
Editing: Lauren Frohne
As part of a worldwide plot to hold giant pillow fights in public spaces, hundreds (maybe a thousand) people gathered at the Cambridge Common in Cambridge, Mass., to promote camaraderie through pillow fighting.
One of the “Banditos Misteriosos,” the Boston event organizers, who would only identify himself as “Bandito E” said that the event is a part the “urban playground movement”, which promotes the idea that there is “more to a city than bars and restaurants,” and encourages people to use outdoor spaces to interact in new and unique ways.
This was a difficult event to photograph, with so much going on and so many people, but after a few minutes, I decided my goal was simply to capture the pure joy that was happening all around me.
Here are some moments from Saturday’s event (and a video at the bottom)…
Saturday afternoon, a group of Libyans living in Boston gathered in Copley Square to show their support for the U.S. and other foreign countries intervening in Libya. I talked to several of the demonstrators who said they would prefer there not to be bombs dropped at all, but if it is going to happen, they would rather the target be Colonel Qaddafi’s forces and not civilians. Many of the demonstrators were young Libyans whose families and relatives are still living in Libya.
A lot has happened since the last time I updated my blog. Namely, I was hired as a multimedia producer for The Boston Globe and moved to New England.
I’ve been busy getting my feet wet in the world of a major metro with a budding video department, but I found time to go to a crucial Boston event this weekend: the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Southie. South Boston is kind of rough neighborhood, but families flock to the little town to celebrate the deep-seeded Irish tradition of drinking in the early afternoon.
“News 21’s Powering a Nation is a student-produced project by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Several different schools participate in News 21’s projects, but this year Powering a Nation clearly stood out because of its unique multimedia reporting on the oil spill. The project features multimedia interviews and stories, as well as interactive games and blog posts written about the project.”
I’m extremely proud that I’m able to say I was a part of this project that has garnered recognition not just as a student project, but also ranked among CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Wikileaks, Pictory, The LA Times, ProPublica, Mint, Life.com and other well-established, professional news companies.
We worked so hard on our stories for Powering a Nation and I cannot believe that it has received this attention.
At the beginning of last week, December 6, I was stationed with a video camera in a Southeast neighborhood of Roanoke (in fact, it was the Southeast Roanoke neighborhood that I actually live in) waiting for police to descend on a man who had begun an armed standoff with them. He was barricaded in a house, had already let his hostages go, the neighboring houses had also been evacuated, and it was freezing cold outside. See the story here on Roanoke.com.
A screengrab from my video showing a police officer in a sniper position during the armed standoff
After about two hours, the reporter leans over and whispers “We got another assignment, quick, let’s go.”
That assignment was the murder of a Roanoke County mother and the amber alert that had been issued for her 12-year-old daughter, Brittany Smith, who was believed to have been abducted by her mother’s 32-year-old boyfriend, Jeffrey Easley. Since Monday, I’ve produced about six videos (on top of my other daily work) pertaining to the story, mostly press conferences, police work and family members pleading for her safe return.
Covering a story like this can be extremely difficult as well as a heartbreaking experience for the family and devastating for a small community like Roanoke County. For me, the whole experience has been a real-life lesson in breaking news, being a flexible video reporter, quick editing, improvising, working with a newsroom team (everyone has pitched in some way or another) and being prepared to multitask on assignment — for one press conference, I even pulled double duty, shooting and editing both pictures and video of the event, on deadline.
My picture featured in The Roanoke Times, Thursday, December 9, 2010 edition as part of the A1 centerpiece, after the jump.
Fortunately the little girl was found in San Francisco on Friday. We are all still patiently awaiting more details of her harrowing week and for the police to reveal more details of her mother’s murder.
On Sunday, the neighbors and I went out to Craig’s dad’s farm in Floyd, Va. to cut down some Christmas trees to decorate our porch. Craig’s dad and his partner own a piece of land in Floyd County with 60,000 trees, three chickens, two cows, two dogs, three bee hives, and a place where they grow their own vegetables.
It was a perfect day out in the mountains, and we came away with two big trees, two little trees and a bunch of branches to make wreaths out of. I documented our adventure… (and also tried out a new watermark for images)…
Since I’m officially a cat lady now, I’m kind of obligated to post beautiful pictures of my new life partner, Quito. I adopted him from the Angels of Assisi shelter here in Roanoke. It’s a no-kill rescue that saves strays and animals from high-kill shelters and fosters and adopts them out to loving owners. He is named after the capital of Ecuador, which I had the amazing opportunity to spend some time in last summer while working on Living Galápagos.
Such an upstanding, handsome young man.
Quito Facts:
Color: Mackerel tabby
Age: approximately 8 months
Favorite food: Chicken with brown rice
Favorite toy: Straw ball, my clothes
Favorite pastime: Running around like a maniac when I try to go to sleep at night
Fun fact: I was going to name him Caña, after the potent and life changing, distilled-from-sugar-cane alcohol which heavily influenced our time on the Galápagos Islands, but I thought it sounded too girly for a boy cat.
His feather toy did not survive much longer after this picture was taken.
It was pretty exciting yesterday evening when I got to the newsroom to get prepped for Friday night football, brought up Roanoke.com on my computer, and saw my video story about Rebecca Keller, the twirler for a local high school band, as the centerpiece.
(click to see larger)
I had so much fun shooting and editing that story, and working with Rebecca and her mom Cheri. They were so sweet and great to work with. They said they enjoyed it and I hope other people did too.
Recently at The Roanoke Times, I helped out with a big retrospective feature we put together about the flood the happened in Roanoke 25 years ago. The paper had of course done features, even multimedia features, about the flood in years past, but we wanted to create a kind of living oral history for the community. It’s one of those things that everybody has a story about, where they were, mishaps, close-calls and we wanted to give people a chance to share those stories, through written letters, pictures, audio stories, and videos.
I produced four audio stories and two videos for the feature as a way to inspire people to call our phone line and leave messages with their stories.
Out of the things I produced for the feature, I think my favorite is the video I shot and edited about Betty Gusler. She lost her 10-year-old son and her 48-year-old mother during the flood, and she has never has the opportunity to share her story. It’s a sad story, but it really shows the depth of her loss even 25 years later. Click the image below to go to the story about Betty on Roanoke.com…
Also check out the whole Legacy of the Flood feature which has archive pictures of the flood and rescues as well as the clean up and relief that went on for months, audio and video stories, old newspaper e-readers, an article about the 10 people who lost their lives, and interactive then & now pictures.
A friend of mine on Twitter wrote last Wednesday morning “To a journalist, the day after an election is just another hangover.” That pretty much sums up the day after the election for me.
Ryan Loew, a multimedia producer on the online team at The Roanoke Times, and I decided to collaborate on a video to tell a story about the race in Virginia’s 5th district. He went to Chatham, Va., to cover Robert Hurt’s election night party and I made the two-hour trek to Charlottesville to cover Tom Perriello’s. I ended up leaving Charlottesville around 10pm and got back to the newsroom a little bit before Ryan, since Hurt actually won.
We spent the next five hours tag-teaming on editing our video story and I think we were happy with the result. We tried something a little less traditional, making use of video diptychs to transition between the two parties.
A mile and a half, three miles round trip, up and then down a mountain: No problem, right? Here’s what Kevin Myatt, The Roanoke Times hiking expert says about Sharp Top…
“A rather steep ascent, but not that long. Many folks of all ages and fitness levels hike this trail almost each day in the warm seasons. Hikers in shape should have little trouble and those in not such good shape will get a needed workout.”
I was definitely in the latter group of that statement. It also took more like 2.5 hours instead of the 1.5 hours boasted in the trail info. But, a beautiful — and humbling — hike up to the summit in an area off the Blue Ridge Parkway called the Peaks of Otter did, however, yield a lot of great outdoorsy pictures of leaves and mountains…
From the summit
(I don’t know these people)
(I don’t know these people either, but it seemed like a really sweet moment)
Me, pretty much dead tired and sweaty at the summit.
Here are some stats about Sharp Top:
Location: Peaks of Otter Recreation Area, Blue Ridge Parkway, mile marker 86.
Length: 1.5 miles one-way (3 miles round-trip)
Elevation: 2,535 at trailhead to 3,875 at summit
Gottasee factor (scenery, scale 0 to 4): of 3.5.
Gottabreathe factor (difficulty, scale 0 to 4): of 3
While my CPOY catalog isn’t as bulky and diverse as last year, I do think the small collection of pictures I chose to submit this year are definitely tighter and stronger. Contests can suck, and be stressful and discouraging, but they definitely, without a doubt, make you sit down and take a hard look at what and how you’ve been shooting. And they can inspire you and make you strive to be better. I’m trying to be less touchy and embarrassed showing other people my pictures, so the screengrab below is an at-a-glance look at my catalog (and you can click through to a slightly bigger one)…
In total, there are (in this order): 3 General News, 2 Features, 5 Portraits, 2 Sports Action, 2 Sports Feature, 1 Pictoral, 1 Documentary Picture Story (based on my thesis project), 1 Individual Multimedia, 1 Multimedia Project (“Splitting main street” from Powering a Nation).
Good luck to everyone who entered! Contests are always exhilarating and humbling… especially CPOY.
Ten years ago, a tragedy struck the LGBT community and the Roanoke community at large. A man expressed his hatefulness through violence that cost the life of one man and injured many others. According to The Roanoke Times…
“On Sept. 22, 2000, a man asked a bouncer at a local restaurant where he could find a gay bar. Given directions to the Backstreet Cafe on Salem Avenue, that man — 54-year-old Ronald Gay — announced he was going to ‘waste some f*gg*ts.’ When he got to the bar, Gay ordered a beer, pulled out a 9 mm Ruger and shot seven people. Danny Lee Overstreet died.”
Each year since, the community has held a memorial at Backstreet Cafe, where the shooting occurred. Some new friends let me hang around and shoot, so here are some pictures from tonight’s memorial…
Being the only metropolitan city in a vast rural area in Southwest Virginia, Roanoke has a rather large LGBT community. I’m working on a side project, and I went to the annual Pride in the Park festival today to shoot around. This year is the 21st consecutive year of the Pride in the Park festival.
The march and atmosphere…
Leland Albright, 23, works for Roanoke Pride as the transgender representative…
My first week in Roanoke is complete. It’s a transition, I suppose, but a good one. I’m all settled in the newsroom and super anxious to start telling some gosh darn stories.
They put me to work for the first time this Friday night to shoot a high school football game. I had to shoot video, interview a player, escape from the deluge of people leaving the game, get stuck in traffic in a high school parking lot, eat Sonic tater tots and drink a Diet Dr. Pepper, capture an hour of tape, edit the game into a short video, encode in Flash, upload and post that same night.
In summation, here’s what The Roanoke Times newsroom looks like at 3:30am…
It was a long, but enthralling night. Editing video on a PC, Windows-based machine for the first time ever, using a program called Edius.
It really wasn’t bad at all, but I didn’t have enough time or sanity left to sweeten the audio and smooth out some things here and there. But overall, I’m happy with the outcome, which you can view at http://www.roanoke.com/varsitycast.
And this weekend, after I caught up on sleep, there was an adventure up to Roanoke Mountain, where I took more pictures of pretty, mountainy things.
You can actually see the back of the giant star on Mill Mountain from Roanoke Mountain!
This is basically the new Windows default desktop background… at least that’s what I was going for…
A leaf bug
This bug typically likes to hang out in my apartment, but here he is, alive and outside for once.
