A group of whimsical Rice alums gave me a scholarship to do this (http://www.goliard.org/), and it remains the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me. How on earth do you top it? Also, when can I go back?

Anyway, they’re pulling together a book commemorating all of the Goliard trips (look at all the cool places people went!), and asked everybody who’s taken one to submit a photo and a blurb about their experience. Mine were directly related to photojournalism/The Future, so I’m posting them here.

They don’t sing “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” at the Fukuoka Dome. Instead, during the seventh inning stretch, the entire crowd does a balloon release: people buy the long, thin, balloons beforehand and blow them up just before the stretch, letting them go in (near) unison. The balloons soar as a scattered cloud, then fall back to earth in a rainstorm of color. The crowd cheers and claps; the game continues as usual. It is both puzzling and fantastic, which is a pretty good way to describe the entire experience of watching Japanese baseball as an American raised on songs about peanuts and Cracker Jack.
When I took this picture, I didn’t know if it had even come out. The LCD screen of my camera cracked two days into my two-week stay, and I had no way of knowing what any of the images post-break looked like, or even how many remained on the memory cards I’d brought with me (I should have just brought a good old-fashioned film camera). I was in Japan to watch baseball, but I was also there to photograph it. I had just finished my junior year; I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. I thought I might want to be a photojournalist.

I hadn’t planned to be at this stadium in the first place. When I made my carefully plotted itinerary before leaving (so designed to hit up as many baseball games as possible and to avoid the problems of trying to book hostels despite not knowing a word of Japanese), I left Fukuoka off the map. The city’s in south Japan, on Kyushu. I thought it was too inconvenient. Plans change.

I’ve always liked the act of “getting there” just as much as the state of “being there,” and the random, roundabout path I took in getting to my current job–as a photojournalist!–was as fun and eventful as the job itself is now. The seeds were planted before my Goliard trip, but they didn’t start to truly germinate until I was there, in Japan, doing my best to capture the spirit of the game I loved so much and do justice to the ways it’d been tweaked for a different group of fans. I still can’t quite believe the whole trip happened, and am still grateful beyond words to the people who made it happen in the first place, who believe in cultivating the “Why not?”–the little piece of crazy that we Rice kids all have inside. Thanks for helping us get there, wherever we were all going.

I also got to meet Bobby Valentine, but that’s another story.

Anyway, today was Opening Day for Little League!

(because every Opening Day must have a “flyover”)

So yesterday we drove up to Provincetown, which is at the very tip of Cape Cod, and spent four hours offshore as the PCCS researchers photographed whales (for IDing later) and collected copepod samples. I know we all learn in elementary school how baleen whales eat zooplankton, but seeing the samples of teeny copepods and thinking about how a many-tonned animal could possibly survive on those along was just mind-boggling.

It was also a little surreal just to see whales. I’ve never seen what I consider “real” whales–whales in the wild; the closest I’ve come were belugas and orcas at zoos and aquariums. And to see three species on my first trip out—there were also fin whales and minke whales in the same feeding grounds—was incredible. The right whales were a little smaller than I expected them to be, but fin whales are about 80 (!!!!) feet long. When they submerged, their bodies just kept going—no wonder people used to think they were sea monsters.

I watermarked these because it’s against the law to be within 500 feet of a right whale (they’re federally protected) unless you have a permit (which we did).

The dark blot in the background is a whale.

But they came a lot closer to the boat.

The white stuff is sea lice living in the calcifications on the whale’s head and body. I remain a little icked out by that fact.

Dolphins swimming around a submerging fin whale. It’s, um, big.

I wrote earlier that the whales were smaller than I expected. I didn’t get a sense for their actual size until I saw them breaching.

All in all, a very excellent assignment. It might be time to go re-watch Blue Planet…

Also, last Thursday was my one-year anniversary of moving to Martha’s Vineyard!

This has been, to put it mildly, a very good year.

So I went through the assignments I’ve shot in the past twelve months and found the ones that I liked best and that I thought best represented a year on Martha’s Vineyard (hence there are no town meeting photos in here, despite being VERY representational, because I didn’t like the images as much). And when I finished, I realized that, in spite of all the summer events I cover, none of the photos were of tourists—they’re all of the year-round Vineyarders. Which is fitting, because it’s this group of people that I like covering the most. The well-known people visit here in the summer, but they get written about all the time. The people who gut out the offseason, when half the island shuts down and the population goes from 100,000 to 16,000—I think they’re much more interesting.

In the true spirit of the Vineyard Gazette, I’m publishing these in black-and-white, just like they appeared in print. The gallery is here:

I also went through the articles I wrote last year and found my favorites. The Harry Potter story features tourists, but otherwise, same deal. Most of the pieces are sports-related, since that’s my beat (it basically fell into my lap. I am a lucky, lucky person). The Island Cup remains my favorite assignment ever–thirteen hours–most of them spent on Nantucket–shooting and reporting, all made worth it when the Vineyard football team won and I finally got to write a victory story. Usually, the high-stakes sports stories start out on a positive note, like the winter teams advancing to the postseason, only to then end on a brutal heartbreaker.* Sometimes I write about ex-Olympians recovering from hockey injuries; sometimes I spend the entire day at the hockey arena (PDF). I get to cover field hockey coaches (PDF) and get crash courses in high school sailing (PDF).

And sometimes I just go knock on random people’s doors and ask them about Halloween on William Street.

But I use the word ‘get,’ not ‘have’ in all these cases because I really do feel so fortunate that I can help cover this community and give it its due. There’s so much more to Martha’s Vineyard than presidential visits and summer homes.

At the Northern Short Course workshop I attended last weekend, photographers were constantly driving home the point that you don’t have to travel the world to find a good story. They’re everywhere. Small stories from the small towns still matter, because they do what journalism is supposed to do: give a voice to people who might not otherwise get one.

This is a fantastic island, and this has been a fantastic year.

*To be fair, this piece won first place in the sports division (for weekly papers) at the New England Press Association awards, so the story ended up being not-so-brutal for me. But I really hope that this season I get to write a “We are [finally] the champions” piece about the tennis team.

I went to cover the middle school basketball championship games tonight. The girls’ matchup, between West Tisbury and Edgartown, was unintentionally quite funny, because half of the girls on each team had had their growth spurts…and the others hadn’t. Makes it easy to set up a defense if you have that kind of advantage to work with. It also made for this picture, which reminds me of one Vivian took at a PeeWee football game during Staff Photo:

Needless to say, Edgartown had the size advantage and thus the better defense, so they tromped West Tis. They also did a better job jazzing up their uniforms:

The boys’ game, however, was a different story. I suspect this had something to do with the more even height matchups, which made for a much more even game. Oak Bluffs, the team that didn’t even make a basket for the first five minutes of the game, rallied in the second quarter to win 31-26. Pretty exciting for middle school hoops; I mostly stopped taking photos in the second because I was trying to write down all of the back-and-forth manueverings.

I did get this shot in the second quarter, though, and it’s my favorite basketball photo I’ve ever taken (the layup didn’t go in):

West Tisbury’s coach is a woman, which I thought was very cool. She coached them to a 9-0 season before they lost this game.

Weird flash effects!

I’m very behind on blogging, and will try to get back up to speed this week…

These were all shot with my 50mm.

Frolicking! Felix (the one in the middle) is such a little hambone.

When it first started snowing, I knew I would be out feature hunting at some point, but I had no idea where the good sledding hills were. As it happened, I drove right by this one on the way to another assignment, and when that shoot was over, came back right away.

I need to get a pair of better gloves; the fingerless ones I’ve been wearing all year are fine when it’s not windy and snowing, but…I had to cut this short because my fingertips were turning purple. Oops.

I’m working at the farm tomorrow, so am hoping to have an alpacas-in-the-snow post up then!

‘Tis also the season for a serious learning curve; I haven’t shot basketball since college, and have never shot hockey. I’m working with a 70-200mm f/4.0 (maybe Santa will bring me an f/2.8!), which makes things interesting. The best part (well, okay, ONE of the best parts) of shooting high school sports, though, is that nobody cares if you use your flash during games, so I can work around the poorly lit gym. Somewhat.

Hockey is proving to be the easier of the two to shoot, mostly because there’s a press booth at the rink, which saves me from having to shoot through the glass (ugh). It’s also easier for me to follow the game through my lens; in most sports cases, I don’t notice having just one eye, but I definitely think it would help to be able to see peripheral action during basketball games, so I could compose things faster. Oh well. Just something to learn to deal with.

On Saturday, all four of the varsity teams had home games (and all four of the teams won, which was pretty great. Go Vineyard!), so I was very busy running back and forth between the high school gym and the hockey rink.