A double dose

Now that I'm reminiscing about the good old days of my career in newspaper, I am hooked on showing off some more work...Most are from my early days at the Herald.

In the above photo I was sent to photograph some Polish event, of which there are many in Hard Hittin' New Britain. No one spoke English. And none of the Polish Boy Scouts wanted to be there.

And the Mauresmo hot shot is from when I was a naive intern at the New Haven Register, working full time for free. They printed the photo and credited to one of their paid photographers. Awesome.

When I respected myself because of my job...

Kris from Bulgaria told Sara I needed to update.
Kris, thanks for the reminder. This one's for you. =)

Kris, I don't know you and I may never meet you.
But I know we speak the same language. We shoot
because we have to.

Back when I was a photojournalist, I got paid (crap) to take photos. That's a pretty common practice around here. You go to school for photojournalism, probably paying upwards of $120,000 for your education, then you run off with your diploma and make $10/hour at a crappy paper, if you're one of the lucky ones.

After I interviewed at The New Britain Herald I cried for hours. I knew was I going to be offered the job, but I knew the paper was dying and it was going to take me down with it. An editor quit on my 5th day on the job. Then a day later the editor of the whole paper decided to stop coming to work. I had no idea who my boss was, or what I was supposed to be doing. It was like that for two years.

More often than not, my assignments were the usual hand shake shot of people congratulating themselves for giving money, or doing something good for the world. Those assignments made pieces of me die. It just seemed too obvious. Very rarely did I get awesome assignments.

Before I quit I made a list of a handful of images I wanted to take. One of them was the underwater shot. At the Herald, where I worked for 2 years as a staff photographer, we had to make our own assignments each day to fill town pages. Usually I would get pissed off because the reporters didn't do their jobs. If they were writing a story, they were supposed to give me a photo assignment. When they didn't, I would have to drive around until I found something interesting. It wasn't until I gave my two weeks notice that I realized how cool an opportunity of "shooting enterprise" really was. There were a ton of town pools in our coverage area, so I figured to start there. Finally one of the towns agreed to let me swim with my camera in a pool loaded with little ones. It only took a week to convince people that I wasn't a creepy perv looking to steal kids from pools.

The shark boy swimming shot was picked up by the Associated Press wire and subsequently
bought by Italy's Vanity Fair. That was pretty cool. A lady with a thick Italian accent called me at work one day to ask to buy the photo for the magazine's weird science section. I thought it was one of my relatives playing a joke on me. =) I told her I'd call her back after I thought about it. As if there was much to think about...

Wendy can post now!

I inadvertently made it impossible for some of you blog readers to leave comments on here. Oops. It's been fixed thanks to my techno-dorky girlfriend. I mean that with lots of love. I don't have the patience it requires to learn these new fangled blog things.

To keep with the travel theme, I give you two photos from very different places. Mount Washington and Cozumel.

Extra bonus post

These ladies were a HOOT!

They thought they would just go wash their clothes at the local laundromat, known as this little dirty watering hole in the middle of Antigua. When they got there they were surrounded by a group of Japanese tourists, each with 4 cameras wrapped around their necks with lenses the size of Texas. They would take their pictures, run up to them afterward and give them handfuls of money. The ladies took the money and laughed. It was absurd. I wish someone paid me to wash my clothes. I wash clothes 3 loads a week. I could make some serious loot!

travel bug

Dear my 2 blog readers,

Sorry I have been falling behind with a photo a day blog project. I will try to be better about it as my trip gets nearer. I leave for Africa June 27th, and I am so excited that I am chewing my cheeks open in my sleep. Seriously, I can't close my jaw without eating more of my cheeks.

To get psyched for the 2 days of flying I am about to experience, I am going to post travel photos to get my inspirational juices flowing. I'll be photographing the "Warm Heart of Africa" otherwise known as Malawi. It's a country most people have never heard of. Or they heard of it because Madonna adopted a child there. The average life expentancy is about 43 years. About half the population has AIDS. Over half a million children are orphaned because of AIDS. It's not quite a vacation so much as a huge learning experience. I will spend most of my time photographing children who lost parents to AIDS, and kids who can't go to school because they don't own pencils. I imagine it's going to be a pretty emotional time for me, but I hope to come home with a new sense of hope and desire to change my life. It's time to start thinking about a job that helps people. I always thought I would do something worthwhile as a career. I'm not quite sure if overcharging people for apartments is the type of "helping people" I dreamed of as a young lass at Choate. (That's a shout out to Sara.)

I'm sure I'll have more to say about Malawi when I am back.

For now you will have to accept some photos from my past travels. Here are some from the land of Oz and Guatemala.

Slow Sunday

I was asked to do a freelance photo gig of a choir. These are some practice shots from one of their rehearsals. A couple days before the actual gig I fell down a stairwell and grew a grapefruit on the side of my ankle. So needless to say, I never hopped my way to the shoot. Photographing singers is not easy. People look down-right crazed when they are passionately singing.

Sense of Placencia

I didn't know what photo to post next. I have about 4 katrillion photos stored in random folders that I no longer know what the file names mean.

This one should be titled "before the flood."

I took this image in Belize during hurricane season a couple years ago. Sara and I found ourselves at Placencia, a little beach town with one very long walking road with lime trees as a canopy. But I will remember it as the place we had the best peanut butter tofu smoothie in the world, made by an ex-prostitute.

Day 4. Redemption.

I've already missed a day of photo blogging! To make up for this great error I am throwing in an extra image. I promise there will be no more photos of Sara's backside.

Day two (a.k.a. Sara's hiney continued...)

I was going through my photos for this project and noticed a bit of a theme. Sara always seems to be running away from me. Hmmmm. =)

I am lucky to have the kind of girlfriend who will come home from a long day at work and will put on her sneaks and hang out under bridges with me. She doesn't mind running around and jumping like a jack ass as cars zoom by. For this, I am appreciative.

P.S. My little blog readers, I am not going to make this blog into a big love fest for Sara. (Although she is entirely deserving!) After the week is over I will move over to a new theme. Send suggestions. I need to give myself some assignments to stay fresh.

The last person to blog.

I never thought I was one of those people who wanted to write things if I didn't have to. Needless to say, I won't be writing too much here. It's just not my forte. (Plus I like to think that I am mysterious. Why should I give it all up for free? =P )

I consider this blog to be my homework. My plan is to post a photo a day.

I'm going to kick this new blog off with a little project I started. I found a cool photo project online called "the one I love." People from all over the world submitted photos of someone in their lives that they loved, brothers,sisters, mothers, boyfriends with grungy hair and stylish shirts...This should be easy enough. I have the perfect camera shy model.

So this is my blog beginning.

I hope to keep up with it every day.