Vineyard Gazette

Bestival

Posted by Ivy

After Streetball I trucked over to the other side of town to the Featherstone Center for the Arts to do a piece on a music festival being held that day. The Featherstone campus is beautiful- tall oaks shading everything and little nature paths all over the place. Of course, once I got there all I wanted to do was pass out under the trees after five hours of in-the-sun basketball shooting, but photos come first.

(The festival was technically called the Best Festival, but I liked merging the words much better).

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Oh hi, flash! Thanks for helping out- you’re pretty great sometimes!

Streetball Saturday (belated post)

Posted by Ivy

I got my 20mm lens last Friday (finally), which happened to be just in time for me to cover the Vineyard Streetball Classic the next afternoon. I really can’t imagine trying to do the assignment without the wide-angle…I was sitting right behind the hoop and even then I wished I had a 14mm or something, because I kept cutting off hands and feet when kids jumped in and out of the frame.

The kids, it should be noted, played from 10:30am to 3:30pm. The founders of the tournament (3-on-3 half-court ball) started it to promote physical activity, and I’d definitely say they were successful in that respect.

I got insanely sunburned that day, because I had only planned to go for an hour and a half or so, but heard whisperings that Ray Allen might make an appearance later on. And so, because I am a good journalist, I stuck around for the whole thing (not bothering to put more sunscreen on…), but Mr. Allen never showed (he was busy golfing elsewhere. Oh well. At least I’ll have a wicked tan for a while.
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This light post is ruining my potentially artsy picture.

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Night of the Fourth

Posted by Ivy

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:
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More interested in taking picture of people taking pictures than in the fireworks themselves…
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I sat on the luggage rack of the bus on the ride home because it was so crowded inside:
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Paradin’

Posted by Ivy

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.

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Some of the other parade images:

Bagpipes- not a hit with everybody:
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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:
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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:
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These looked better in black and white. They’re lens-flarey, but I like them anyway:
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Post-parade exhaustion:
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World Cup, parte dois

Posted by Ivy

Still working on the World Cup feature. I went to the England/Germany game at ten in the morning on Sunday (after getting up a 7:30 to haul over to West Tisbury for photo shoot with a farmer. Blah).

There were quite a few England fans in the restaurant, but despite some promising play in the first half, the game did not go the way they wanted it to…
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(MU photo-js, doesn’t the guy in the middle look like Joel? Unreal.)

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Future pubbers.

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Bartender Garry Metters fills in the World Cup bracket hanging on the wall of the Coop de Ville. “You have no idea how much it hurt to do that,” said Metters, who is from England.

I had two shoots worth of losing teams’ fans, which was annoying. But fortunately, there was a still a Brazil match to go watch.

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I mentioned before that there’s a huge Brazilian population on Martha’s Vineyard (before that it was a large Portuguese population who came here for the whaling). It was a very different experience watching them watch the game–unlike US fans, or even England fans, they just EXPECT that Brazil will win. It’s a given. The tension that was building in the US game and the sad resignation that showed up during the England match weren’t there at all. I’ve never really seen any fans with that kind of wholly confident outlook towards their team. That’s not to say the Brazilian fans were at all boring or subdued about showing support, though.

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Vani Pessoni buries her face in her hands after watching Brazil miss a goal opportunity in a World Cup Round of 16 match against Chile. Pessoni was on call at the hospital where she works at the time of the match. “I’m a freak,” she says of her fandom. “I get way too into it.”

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Luis Lopes (left) high-fives across the table after Brazil scores a second goal against Chile. The Brazilian team could be even better than it is, according to Lopes, but “they go for the big-name players” when making a roster, rather than pure talent.

20100628_1234Meadow Willoughby, 3, plugs her ears to block the roar of the crowd as mother Tatiane daSilva embraces her after watching Brazil score a third goal against Chile.

World Cup!

Posted by Ivy

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.

Men in Kilts: Outtakes + A Select!

Posted by Ivy

On Thursday I went to a fundraiser auction for a high school theater troupe. The group is going to Fringe festival in Scotland in August, and is about $5000 short of the total $60000 they needed. This particular event was “Men in Kilts,” in which some of the high school teachers and alums paraded around in kilts while people bid on their services (mind out of the gutter), which ranged from guitar lessons to gardening to architectural consulting (I promise this last one is true).

I was not the ‘main photographer’ there (the Gazette accidentally sent two of us, and Ray asked to cover it, plus the Times had their guy taking photos as well), which left me free to take whatever photos I wanted to instead of doing straight event coverage. Overall, not my best assignment—I struggled with terrible lighting and my camera’s general low-light issues, and while I had brought my flash, I was hesitant to use it in the face of there being two OTHER cameras there both using flash. I would post a photo of what happened when all three of them went off at the same time, but I don’t want to blind you.

Here’s my favorite image from the whole thing:
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And here are some outtakes from the event (including one with my fellow Gazette photog Ray in plain sight):

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This is SO CLOSE to being what I wanted it to be, but I hit the shutter a half-second too late.
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Restaurant to Farm to Table

Posted by Ivy

These are some images from a profile I photographed of Dan Sauer, a local farmer’s market vendor. The story focused on Sauer’s decision to give up his job as head chef at the Outermost Inn, one of the Island restaurants (he’d also worked in some big-name restaurants in NYC), and instead farm crops in his backyard. He and his wife are hoping to get a permanent storefront at some point in the future, but for now are concentrating on the twice-weekly farmer’s market, sales to restaurants (naturally), and continuing to do some cooking for private functions.

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Homegrown shitake mushrooms! Who knew?

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Solstice Saturday: Harborfest

Posted by Ivy

The BIG event going on today (among the fifty billion other ones) was Harborfest in Oak Bluffs. The main drag gets closed to car traffic, vendors and musicions come out to play, and people get very sunburned.

We had done a huge preview story on Harborfest for Friday’s paper, and the editors didn’t want it to overshadow the entire weekend of festivals, so nobody was officially assigned to shoot it. I stopped by on the way back from Juneteenth (not too difficult; the restaurant where it was held is right on Circuit Avenue in downtown O.B.) and made some photos. I don’t really think they’re all newspaper-type images, but I had fun shooting nonetheless.

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