It’s summer (my third one working for the Gazette! Milestones are pretty sweet)! Things are crazy busy, but I am going to try to be better about blogging…
summer
The Fair!
I won a blue ribbon at the fair for a photo I took of the racing piggies last year (and an honorable mention for a draft horse photo. Because draft horses are the best)! Unfortunately, the piggies didn’t return this year; they were replaced by “jumping frogs,” which were, frankly, just not the same. Oh well.
There’s still lots of good things to photograph at the fair:
We all know the Lord of the Rings; this is the Lord of the Chickens.
Here Comes The Fair
Possible Dreams and the Impossibly Beautiful Sunset
I photographed the Possible Dreams auction on Monday night, which is an event that raises money for Martha’s Vineyard Community Services. As opposed to most auctions, where you bid on things, this auction offers experiences–usually of the one-of-a-kind sort. The things that are offered are also one-of-a-kind. Possible Dreams raised $231,000 (give or take a few hundred dollars) this year.
But for me, the very best part of the assignment was walking outside of the tent afterwards to find this sky:
I mean, wow.
When the sky turned more pink, I took this photo [which I cropped afterwards] from the base of a fountain in the park:
Here are some photos from the auction itself:
Norman Bridwell (author/illustrator of the Clifford the Big Red Dog books), his wife Norma, and Marc Brown (author/illustrator of the Arthur books). Both authors are longtime donators of Dreams to the auction. Childhood books ftw!
This year Norman Bridwell donated a painting he made of Clifford reading an Arthur book on a Vineyard beach while the Island Home comes in. Aww!
Artist Meg Mercier works on the final item of the auction, a plein aire painting of Ocean Park with the Possible Dreams tent set up. Mercier began work on the painting at 3:15 p.m. on the day of Possible Dreams, and finished about a half-hour before the event ended. (I wish I had a lens wider than my 20mm, because I really wanted the tent itself to be more obvious in the background. Oh well.)
Memorial Day
I did my very first freelance assignment for the Gazette last Memorial Day, reporting and photographing the annual parade.
This year, I was just doing photo duty, which was a huge relief.
I also got to photograph at the Memorial Day picnic, which was very Rockwellian.
Night of the Fourth
Some hours after the parade, there are also Fourth of July fireworks in Edgartown. I will be completely honest and say they aren’t as good as the August fireworks in Oak Bluffs, but it was still a good show.
I used a dock post as a tripod, opened the shutter for half a second at f/2.8, and this happened:
More interested in taking picture of people taking pictures than in the fireworks themselves…
I sat on the luggage rack of the bus on the ride home because it was so crowded inside:
Paradin’
The parade in Edgartown on the Fourth of July is a Big Deal here. I had never been before; I don’t usually come to the Vineyard until August, and have missed the action. I was one of two photographers assigned to cover it this year.
It’s hard to cover events like these because I always feel trapped in cliches. I know what the paper is going to want to run (kids, veterans and flags), and I know I have to shoot those things…but I feel like I should be doing something MORE, and then when I don’t, the assignment seems like a wasted opportunity.
But despite feeling like I didn’t do enough, I did take a photo that combines the three above things, and it was the one that ran on the front page. Which is pretty sweet, because the photo was about 11×6 in print and I haven’t yet gotten over seeing images THAT big in the newspaper.
Some of the other parade images:
Bagpipes- not a hit with everybody:
I took this mostly because I long for the day when rollerblades will be back en vogue and was so excited to see them IN A PARADE:
I was so sad this didn’t make it into the paper. The dog (she was an Irish Wolfhound) was about as tall as her owner. Adorable:
These looked better in black and white. They’re lens-flarey, but I like them anyway:
Post-parade exhaustion:
World Cup!
I love the World Cup. As is the case with most sports things, I didn’t start really paying attention until I was fourteen, at which point I became one of Those People who wakes up at 5 in the morning to watch games. When I was sixteen, I lived in Spain for two months and started paying more attention to international club soccer, and four years after that I lived in Barcelona for a semester. It’s very hard to live in Barcelona and NOT get swept up by football mania; FC Barcelona has been one of the best clubs in the world for the past several years, and the Catalans are quite proud of that.
Plus, the Americans have been doing well in their international matches lately (Spain? Confederations Cup?), which gives me even more cause to love El Mundial.
This is why I asked my editors at the paper if I do a short feature about soccer-watchers on the Vineyard; there are a lot of ex-pats here, as well as a sizable Brazilian population. Today I went to the Coop de Ville in O.B. to photograph the USA/Ghana game, and I’ll be going back there tomorrow for England/Germany (I’m mostly interested in that one for the ex-pat factor, and because Oak Bluffs liquor laws make it so alcohol can’t be served before noon…but the game starts at ten. Interesting twist!). Brazil plays on Monday, so I’ll work then, too, but probably not at the Coop.
Yes, shooting spectators is pretty much a gimme assignment, but I had a ton of fun regardless (plus, it helped me not completely stress out about the US team playing, which I tend to do when actually watching them). I don’t have everybody’s names, unfortunately, since there was a surprising ebb and flow of the crowd considering that soccer games don’t lend themselves well to leaving in the middle.
The lazy among blog viewers can just skip to #10.
Cliffside
After photographing Dan Sauer in his backyard garden on Tuesday, I decided to hang around Aquinnah for a little bit. Aquinnah is the westernmost area of Martha’s Vineyard and is home to less than 400 people, a third of whom (more or less) are Wampanoag. The town actually used to be known by the English name of Gay Head until they decided to change back to its original Wampanoag appellation.
There isn’t all that much to do in Aquinnah…unless you’re a tourist and want to visit the cliffs. Of course, even homegrown Islanders should visit the cliffs, because they are simply gorgeous.
This photo has probably been taken several thousand times by now, but never on my camera:
Some more ‘been-there, taken-that’ pictures:
I came down from the lookout point to find two girls squealing about a little black snake on the path (“Pick it up!” “It might be poisonous!” “Just pick it up!”). An older naturalist-type guy walked up and scooped up the snake for the girls to see (it wasn’t poisonous, for the record…). In related news, I’m not sure those shorts count as shorts.
Making the Most of a Situation
To all of you posed photo ops out there, I say ‘bah’.
