Michael Jackson Premiere

                                                                                                             copyright Newsday 2009

I went to the premier of "Michael Jackson's This Is It" in Time Square to make a video for Newsday.com. It was windy and raining but there were still many avid MJ fans ready to sing and dance for their hero.

Flashes Of Hope

This August I spent a day at Camp Tyler Hill in Pennsylvania working for Flashes of Hope. "Flashes of Hope is a non-profit organization dedicated to creating powerful, uplifting portraits of children fighting cancer and other life-threatening illnesses." (words from the org's website)

I had the opportunity to meet and photograph 10 beautiful young girls at this camp. Above from top to bottom are pictured: Precious, Alejandra, Danielle, Jasmine, and Teresa. I had a great experience and I hope that the girls I photographed did too, some were happy to be in front of the camera and at ease, while others were shy and hesitant to smile. I almost felt like we- the photogs from Flashes of Hope- descended on this camp with little warning to these young kids. It can be scary to be in front of the camera where all the attention is focused on you alone. Especially if you are going through a difficult time in your life like these girls were. I hope I had a positive impact on them that day and I hope that the photographs I made gave happiness to their families.

If you are interested in volunteering for this organization as a photographer you can go to this link to find out more and sign up. I had a great experience.

NEWSDAY: featured on the NYTimes Lens blog

Newsday recently published a series on Alzheimer's on Long Island, both articles and multimedia. One of the videos was featured in yesterday's Lens post of 'must see: videos worth watching' which you can read here.

Below is the piece the Lens blog highlighted writing: "In this episode — one of the more touching in Newsday’s series, “Alzheimer’s on Long Island” — Ms. Richmond takes us on the journey from Mr. Richmond’s marriage proposal to their meetings in his assisted-living center. Her words are intimate and moving, emotionally underscoring such telling shots as fingers scratching a hat and a half-completed coloring book figure. Though the transitional music at the end is somewhat intrusive, this is still a quiet and powerful testament to a wife’s love for her husband."

"For nearly two years, reporter Denise M. Bonilla and photographer J. Conrad Williams Jr. followed six families in order to chronicle the agony of Alzheimer’s disease and to provide an inside look at the role of the caregiver." Newsday writes about the project. But what started with 2 ended with more than 30 people having contributed to the project.

You can see the other video pieces and articles on Newsday's site here. The story has been carried across multiple platforms, the layout of the stories and photographs in the paper was well done and moving, videos were created about each family. And each one was edited to different lengths, I think 5 minute pieces for the website, but also 2 minute pieces which the local tv station- Channel 12- is running, I happened to turn the tv on the other day to one of the stories and it was really cool to see work done by newspaper visual journalists broadcast on television.

I joined Newsday far after this project was underway and I only saw the tail end of people putting finishing touches together. But I am happy that the paper is working on projects of this scope and putting such emphasis on the multimedia mode of telling the story.

NEWSDAY: cranking out the daily video

I was hired at Newsday as a 2-year intern in multimedia about a month ago. I'm doing a lot of daily video's right now. It has definitely been a learning experience so far. I've produced news videos before, but not to this scale of everyday having to have a finished product. I have learned to be faster and more efficient, and I'm sure I will continue to fine tune my editing. Here are a few videos I've done so far.

These three video's are from the Hampton's International Film Festival. I went for three of the five days to cover the event and produced a video at the end of each night. I got to meet and interview a couple different celebrities including Steve Buscemi, Alec Baldwin, Cheryl Hines, and Josh Lucas. This was my first visit to the Hamptons. It was a long drive out there!

I've had to cover several protests, below are daily videos I made for Newsday featuring two groups of people protesting very different actions.

Portraits

looking to the future or maybe to the past

I was looking through my photo library and came upon this photo that I took during my internship at the Syracuse Post-Standard: removal of the big Christmas tree in the town center. I like all the white space.

scenes from a x-country meet