It only seems fitting that I should begin this endeavour on the first of December. A month of wishes and dreams, hopes and prayers. Some will emerge, and other will fade away just as sure as the fog rolls back on a winter’s day.

I am an artist, I am a musician, and on my path I learned there was one more thing in my life that would flow through my veins, photojournalism. I am a photojournalist. Writing with light, painting with words. That’s who I am, feeling like the luckiest girl in the world. Yes, privileged to witness countless activities public and private moments that most people only imagine. Blessed beyond my expectations. 

Cursed, I am filled with and battling cancer as I sit here in the dark writing through the fear that overwhelms me now. I talk it out with you, and the three constant companions that surround me day and night when I’m lucky enough to be home. Two-old cats, Minky and One Eye. And a dog that I just adopted who’s three years old, I think sent to me by God. His name is Chance. I named him Chance because it was a chance for company and a chance to save a life that I’ve found to be remarkable. He watches over me when we go for our walks everyday. And he looks and listens to what I have to say. 

My hope for this blog is not to be sorrowful or fill you with undue sadness. I’m hoping that I am able to give a good example of a good fight. A fight against something I can’t see, but a fight that I will find a way to inspire not only myself but others to live life every day to the fullest. To take chances and every now and then jump in the puddles and make a splash. Life is for joy. We wait for it. It comes and we wonder why it goes? I don’t know, I just know that if it stayed we wouldn’t know what joy is would we? But for now, my blood count is good, my amazing doctor has a plan and the cancer is deadly and on the move. Pushing against my chest with every breath I take. We’re gonna start pushing back. And we’re gonna win. 

As this story unfolds, I may ramble at times, please be gentle with me as things are a lot more complicated than they look right now. But for now it’s easy to say I have Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. 

A high school track star overcoming autism is the hero of this recent news feature by a master storyteller.  Boyd Huppert is like a modern day Charles Kuralt, and is an award winning reporter at KARE 11 in Twin Cities, Minnesota.  I once attended a 1-day writing workshot with Huppert and his regular photojournalist, Jonathan Malat.  Together, they once won the prestigious National Edward R. Murrow Award for journalism with a story about a duck in a truck.  This time, he meets a young man whose track achievements were an answer to his parents’ prayers for him. Click here to read the print version of the story, or you can click on this photo of Andrew Gerdts to go directly to the video:

Andrew Gerdts, high school track star overcoming autism

If you are a photographer, a writer, a news photojournalist or just someone who appreciates a well told story, reporter Boyd Huppert is definitely someone whose work you will want to watch and study…

His writing and reporting combined with Jonathan Malat’s photojournalism techniques embody the NPPA style of storytelling.  Some of the key principles are using steady, sequenced video shots, tightly edited for pacing, as well as meaningful natural sound, action-reaction sequences, memorable moments, clear writing, and surprises that keep the viewer interested. Huppert likes to put little surprises into his stories about every 10 seconds; he calls these the “little gold coins” that reward the viewer for continuing to watch the piece.  There is a link to Boyd Huppert’s “Land of 10,000 Stories” collection in my blogroll on the right side of my website.

In 2000, I attended the week-long NPPA News Video Workshop, often called just “The Workshop.” It’s a one-week, intensive course where you are literally engaged in learning about the craft of multimedia storytelling about 12 hours a day. It is inspiring and career-changing for any shooter who attends.  It’s only offered one week per year and only in Norman, Oklahoma. You could spend four years at any college and walk away with a degree in broadcast journalism and not learn what you will learn at The Workshop in a week. The instructors are working reporters, photographers and editors who regularly win national awards for their work. I have found that keeping up with the output of the NPPA instructors is a good way to stay fresh and inspired to do good work even when the job gets stale.

If you are a news photographer getting into video, NPPA has offered a “Platypus” track at The Workshop to help make that transition. When I was there in 2000, they were using the Canon XH-1, which uses a real manual lens like photographers are used to using every day.  I would highly recommend the course, since so far there really are no books or DVDs that have been produced that take you step by step through the NPPA style. At the Workshop, each presenter has a video presentation custom made for the occasion, and you just have to take notes. They also give you a notebook; I guard mine pretty well, since it is the only reference manual I have available to refresh my memory.

Recently, Focal Press put out a book that looks like it might be the first NPPA-level textbook for news video shooters. It’s called “Roll!,” and I just ordered a copy, so when that gets here I will read it an post a review.  It’s been on my wish list for a while.  I have several other books I plan to review here as well, and these reviews will go under a new section of my blog for professional development.  I am planning some tutorials on video editing to relay some of the video storytelling methods I have learned over the years with examples of how to translate those into actual work.  If you have any specific questions or areas of interest, please let me know in the comments section of this post and I will try to find answers for you.  Besides sharing good work I have found on the website as examples of excellent storytelling in a digital medium, I also want to help grow the pool of good storytellers by sharing what I have picked up in 10 years as a working TV videographer.

I was channel surfing and ended up on Georgia Public Television. A musical group, Celtic Woman, was playing. I think I have found another kind of music that I like. This group is going to be in Atlanta at the Fox Theatre on February 15 & 16, 2010. I may have to get tickets. I really enjoyed their music. Amazing Grace is one of my favorite songs, and they sang it with bagpipes in the background. Very beautiful.

I did an additional search about this song, and found this video containing images of the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11, as well as Iraq war images.

I am working on my executive now. I will be showing my instructor tomorrow morning my contact sheet for the images. Hopefully she can find one that she likes. Then I will have to print it and mount it and my fashion which are due next Monday morning. I am also working on my Photo Eassy for Photojournalism which is due next Tuesday!

My assignment today was to shoot a portrait of Spring Lake’s Marcus Fowler.  I had fun…

 Marcus Fowler | for The Muskegon Chronicle

What’s truly ridiculous about Israel’s decision to freeze all new construction in the West Bank, is that nobody takes it seriously.
Everybody made such a big deal out of it when the plan was announced, but even the biggest panickers, the newspapers, attached a complimentary grain of salt with each issue they sold.

The Israeli left says the plan won’t be enforced, so it means nothing, and more importantly it doesn’t change the fact that the territories are still occupied. The right says they won’t abide by it and have no intention of stopping construction anywhere, because the decision is stupid and irresponsible. The Palestinians say it’s not enough, and unilateral freezing of new construction for only 10 months does not offer any kind of incentive or jump start future peace talks. The US government, who was the target audience of this little charade, probably doesn’t see it as anything more than just that, because they have a Jew for White House Chief of Staff and he knows all the Jewish shticks.
So who does take it seriously? News photographers, who enjoy a good field trip out of the city, and the construction workers. The construction workers, most, if not all, of whom are Arabs from the territories are probably the only ones affected by this, because they’re suddenly out of a job.
And as we know, unemployment leads to poverty, and poverty leads to frustration, and frustration leads to despair, especially if you have kids to feed, and despair usually provides a fertile ground for extremism, and from there the road to terrorism is short and well lit.
And of course, there are few better excuses to resume Jewish construction in the West Bank than a terrorist attack that originates in the same West Bank.

So why don’t we fast forward ten months , finish building these houses, and save the Jewish families the grief of watching their hopes and dreams evaporate, and the Arab families the grief of becoming more empoverished than they already are?

(In the picture – Arab construction workers along with their lunch bags, wait to be driven home by their foreman, after the construction site they were working at was shut down. A tip of the hat to Charles Ebbets)

This photo is from my  visit to Oujda, a city on the eastern Moroccan-Algerian border. The photograph was taken of a migrant camp on the city’s outskirts. I wrote about Oujda last March:

This border city is both the point of arrival, and often the place of departure as well. Deportees from Rabat, Casablanca and the rest of Morocco are bused here. At night, government security officials march deported migrants into the desert, to the Algerian border. There, they are abandoned, and told to walk into Algeria. Often, the Algerian military is waiting on the other side. As one Moroccan put it, the migrants are like “ping-pong balls,” bounced back and forth between two feuding nations. Most eventually end up back in Oujda, a place as hellish as the bandit-filled desert just outside the city.

Far from Oujda’s central district, 2,000 sub-Saharan migrants live in makeshift refugee camps, dubbed tranquillos. Some camps are permanent, while others move around to reduce the likelihood of police raids. Shelter is primitive: Blue tarps provide minimal cover, and most sleep on the bare ground. At night, migrants trek to the nearby university, where sympathetic students give them water.

Employment isn’t a possibility for sub-Saharan migrants stranded in Oujda. The unemployment rate is well above the nationwide average of 9 percent. With no way to work, begging is often the only alternative. For those who fall ill, there is little recourse. Police monitor the hospitals, arresting anyone without proper identity papers before treatment is administered. Similarly, they tightly control the highways, train lines and bus routes. Even within Oujda, taxi drivers often refuse to pick up sub-Saharans, for fear of being pulled over by local law enforcement. Travel by foot is the most practical, and often only, way to leave the city.

Whitman Magazine

Nancy Lynn photo by Lisa Helfert

How did you do that?

Who is that?  Is that you?

Did you get sick?

I have been ask so many questions about this image that I thought I would answer them in a blog post.     The image became a poster as part of Poster Palooza, a promotion created by The ASMP DC chapter to get the word out about DC fotoweek.   Many thanks to Paul Fetters and Irene Owlsey for the idea and implementation.

I took this photo of Nancy Lynn, a stunt pilot while on assignment for Maryland Life Magazine several years ago.   Nancy Lynn is navigating barrel rolls over the Chesapeake bay while I held on to my camera.   We did this stunt five times to get this shot.   There was no place to attach the camera, so I handheld the camera.  Even after pre-focusing and framing it was hard to hold the camera steady with the force during the turns.  The lighting was tricky because  when she was completely upside down over the water she was in shadow.   I think the best part of the photograph is that she looks happy.   Her expression was the easiest part to capture, she looks happy in all the photos. She loved her job.

No, I did not get sick –  just a little green.  Nancy Lynn made me brave with her incredible spirit.  She was strong, smart, brave and kind.  She would have wanted everyone to be as empowered as she looks in the photograph.    Between air shows she gave talks to young women and men about following their dreams.   Sadly, Nancy Lynn died while performing a stunt during an air show in Culpeper Virginia.   She was only one of a handful of women to perform as stunt pilots in aviation history.

For more information on Nancy Lynn

To see more  Poster Palooza images

Consider this: a starlet is photographed with a musician, at a hockey game; she is smiling.

One week later, she is photographed with her boyfriend, on vacation; she is frowning.

And based on these two photographs, we get a tabloid story suggesting she’s about to split with the boyfriend and take up with the musician.

Can these pictures be telling us the truth?

Let’s make the assumption that these photos were taken at 1/250 second.

Each minute contains 15,000 exposures of 1/250 second.

Each hour contains 900,000.

How likely is it that said starlet also frowned with the musician, and smiled with the boyfriend, in some of those millions of 1/250 second exposures they spent in each other’s company?

Photographs don’t contain stories; we make up stories about them. Andre Kertesz said that photographs cannot lie, but liars can take photographs. And we can also arrange and discuss photographs to support any story we want to tell.

This is not exclusive to the tabloids and the papparazi, although they provide the most dishonest examples.

Consider Doug Ball’s famous shot of Robert Stanfield fumbling a football. Newspapers chose to run this photo over all the shots of him throwing, catching, smiling and whatever else. And this choice may have cost Stanfield the election.

Or consider Eddie Adams’s Saigon execution. The limits of the frame and of the exposure time conceal the fact that the victim of this execution was no civilian; he was a known VietCong fighter. But with that context removed, the photograph shows a soldier executing a civilian.

Or, for a more recent example, consider the crowds pulling down Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad. Shots from a more distant vantage showed how small those crowds actually were, suggesting a different story entirely.

In our much-ballyhooed digital age, we assume that the major ethical issues in photojournalism revolve around Photoshop. But they don’t, and they never have.

1/900,000 of an hour can’t really tell the truth about anything. If you need Photoshop to lie with a camera, you just aren’t trying very hard.

Just 2 hours north of Bangkok by train, the ancient capital city of Ayutthaya sits in a hot, dusty valley with two major rivers flowing through it.  In fact the city proper is actually an island between these two rivers with only a handful of bridges and ferries crossing over them.  There’s almost 700 years of history in this city, Thailand’s old capital fortress, and the ruins and restored temples share this story with anyone curious enough to venture inside.  It was sacked and looted so many times by Burma and Laos that by the 18th century the king was fed up and moved shop down to Bangkok.   Thankfully there is still plenty left to look at and photograph, including some absolutely stunning wats and chedi’s (stupas).

We stayed here only 2 nights and 3 days, although as a tourist it isn’t really practical to spend much longer.  Temples and ruins, like I mentioned, are the prime attractions here and after looking at 20 or 30 it’s time to move on.  The city itself, however, is vibrant and bustling and has much to offer the traveler who’s interested in more than the history of the area.  Our first day we explored most of the city proper on foot, covering a dozen kilometers and a dozen temples in an afternoon.  Most of the temples here were built of brick and a mortar covering.  As we explored their ruins, the structures ranged from massive piles of brick to perfectly preserved steeples and arches and domes.  We wandered in and out of different crumbling landscapes, stumbling upon herds of grazing cattle, couples sleeping in the shade of the chedis, street dogs patrolling their territories, and other hidden treasures of the unknown.  Towards the end of the day we found ourselves walking into an elephant camp, where around two dozen elephants and their riders hung out, waiting to give rides to tourists through the city ruins.  Instead of riding them, we contented ourselves to loitering with them and taking photos.

The following day we rented bikes to take us to the outer reaches of the city and its most impressive temples.  Navigating the chaos of Thailand’s streets is daunting on a bicycle.  There is a distinct hierarchy in place on the road, with the most fragile and destructible at the bottom of the totem pole.  Essentially, the more vulnerable you are, the more attentive you must be (if you value your life).  Bikes are just pedestrians moving precariously closer to traffic in a seated position.  Nevertheless, we survived and had a blast.  One temple we visited on the outskirts of town was pretty in its own right, but what fascinated me the most by it was a tree out back.  It was a Bodhi tree, with a massive, twisting, tentacle-like trunk completely encompassing a small chedi and a statue on it.  All you can see of the statue is its face barely emerging from the roots.  Another temple even further from town was equally rewarding to visit.  The temple was a massive stone chedi about 60 meters tall with a small complex of ruins surrounding it.  Cows and horses were tied strategically to trees around the temple such that they could graze sections of the lawn, creating a living lawn mowing and fertilizing system.  Because of the strict value of all life in the Buddhist tradition, temples are often safe havens and refuges for all kinds of neglected animals, from horses to dogs to chickens and everything in between.  Whenever we visit a temple, there is inevitably some adorable puppy or kitten that claws at my heart strings when I see them.  This time there were 3 puppies, barely 6 weeks old, that decided my arm was interesting and all started licking it in unison.

One of the last temples we saw in Ayutthaya was unique in that it belonged to a sect of Buddhist nuns.  The order of monks in the Theravada Buddhist tradition is male oriented, and while women were explicitly included in the teachings of Buddha, they face many challenges as nuns such as funding for their temples.  This temple is specifically renowned for its hundreds of Buddha statues that are wrapped in saffron scarves, creating a mystical and colorful atmosphere throughout the complex.  We ditched our bike at the gate and spent the last slivers of daylight exploring the crumbling relics before making the trip back home to our guest house.  It was around this time that Jennifer got hit with her first dose of Delhi Belly, aka Montezuma’s Revenge, aka food poisoning, so we peddled home fast.  At one point we managed to get ourselves onto an expressway with barely any shoulder to bike on, then again we found ourselves on another major thoroughfare on the wrong side of the road.  It was a miracle we made it back alive through the dark, but all I had to do was keep up with Jennifer as she tore through the city like a bat out of hell.  Later that night her stomach was feeling better…

The last day in Ayutthaya was pleasantly lazy and spent mostly in the shade for a change.  We arranged an overnight sleeper train to the north of Thailand that night and loitered in one of the few backpacker cafes along a quiet side street in town.  Tony’s Place as it was called, was run by a flamboyantly gay Thai who was everywhere when you didn’t need anything and nowhere in sight when you did.  The slow service allowed us to take in some good people watching however.  Later in the afternoon, as our departure to Chiang Mai in the North was approaching, we moved all our gear to the train station and had some dinner.  After sitting down and ordering some food, we noticed a gentleman sitting next to us munching contentedly on a bag of indiscernible contents.  He noticed us watching him with inquisitive eyes, so he turned around and pulled out a monstrous barbequed grasshopper and offered one to each of us.  The taste was mild, like a dusty stale cracker, and the crunchy texture was like biting into a huge sunflower seed with the shell and all.  I’m sure I made a horrible face as I choked it down, yet he still offered me more.  After Jennifer nearly gagged eating hers, he understood.  It was worth trying, but never to be repeated.

The train pulled in about 30 minutes late, which is a miracle by Thai train standards.  We purchased a couple liters of cheap beer and a bag full of snacks for the 13 hour trip, hopped on, found our beds, and began the next leg of our journey through Thailand.

Long Island, NY, 2009, ©SLI

Copyright © Guy Martin

Photojournalist Guy Martin visited the Cossack regions of southern Russia and documented the training academies where young children, both boys and girls, are recruited as future defenders of Russia’s borders. They learn to fight, kill and most likely never to question the motives of their dear leaders. The photo above shows a rare mix of a boy/girl Cossack academy where children learn the basics of gun training. Gun training! The kids in that picture could not be any older than nine or ten years old and they are learning how to shoot people. There is so much wrong with this image, I don’t even know where to begin, so I won’t say anything. I’ll let the photos speak for themselves.

Though it is interesting that in America we have places like this to threaten our children with if they get out of line. And wayward high school students with no direction are often encouraged to enlist in military academies. I suppose some could make the argument that what youth lacks today is a structured upbringing, but there is something a tad disturbing about enlisting a nine year old for military training. I know Russia is a hard country with a deep cultural pride, but this practice reeks of child abuse and general creepiness.

May 2009, Bucharest, Lipscani

Singin’ Santa Man, originally uploaded by © Don Iannone Photography.

Man playing his guitar near the Westside Market on Cleveland’s Near West Side on a sunny Saturday in November.

Sleeping Homeless Man, originally uploaded by © Don Iannone Photography.

Homeless man sleeping in the sun on a bench near the train station in Cleveland’s Flats.

Amazing photo documentary of Stanmeyer, VII Photo agency. It’s getting in to your mind. 

There no words needed for his work, it explains the reality of the world we live in. Check the images on:

 http://viiphoto.wg.picturemaxx.com/series/1.1178

Please. Light. I dream that one day the newspaper will send me to shoot something where there is actual light.

Tonight, two shoots where no flash was allowed (or possible). I started with a recital. Church. Not possible to move – I had to stay where  I was and not in the best place. And no flash.

So that meant that to get acceptable shutter speeds (1/125th sec on a 200mm IS lens, which ias as low as you can go, really) I had to use 1600 ISO at f/2.8, which is just OK on the 1D MkIII:

Not too bad. Thank God for f/2.8 lenses. Why do I pay $2,000 for my lenses? This is why.

Then it got worse. Rush to get to the next appointment: Tennis. And indoors. And in very low light. To see the ball and to freeze action I needed 3200 ISO – and even then at f/2.8 I was only able to get to 1/320-1/400th second, never faster.

Big time noise. But…  I (and hence the newspaper) got what I went in for.

And tonight I will dream of venues with light.

He is one of my favorite photojournalist/documentary photographer. I had the pleasure of seeing him speak about his work and experiences at the Getty Museum many years ago. I recently visited his website and thought that I would share his work!

” I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated.” – James Nachtwey