Unfortunately, there wasn’t any punkin chunkin at Living Local this year, but the entire afternoon was a blast nonetheless.
MV Gazette
Kids Derby
The 67th Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby is here!
The New York Times wrote a pretty lengthy piece on the Derby for this Sunday’s paper. Check it out; it’s a great intro to the event.
Anyway, this year I’m one of two reporters doing Derby coverage, and it’s been fantastic so far (here is a pretty lengthy piece I wrote last week about the four Derby fish). Fishermen are a bit hard to track down–since they’re always out on the boats–but they’re wonderful to talk to once you actually find them. They’re all very Hemingway-esque (shocker!), with their short, direct manners of speaking, and because fishing brings a mix of serious ego-quashing and quiet satisfaction, they have great perspective on life in general.
This morning, I covered the Kids Derby, which usually draws about 200 kiddos (and their parents) to the ferry docks in Oak Bluffs. This is the only time when the docks are used for anything other than loading and unloading passengers, and it couldn’t be for a better cause. I love seeing the youngest fishermen, the four-year-olds, rushing up to the weigh-in table clutching a teeny little scup, totally excited about the whole endeavor.
Fourth of July Parade, year three
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…
The Very Best Opening Day
Whoa, hi, blog! More than a month without an update- oops.
Anyway, today was Opening Day for Little League!
(because every Opening Day must have a “flyover”)
Ahoy!
A few weeks ago, a small pod of right whales was spotted off the southern shore of the Vineyard. Since there are only about 450 Northern Atlantic right whales left in the world, this was a pretty rare (and pretty awesome, in the literal sense of the word) sight. Pete wrote a story about the sighting, and while making his calls, got in touch with the Provincetown Center for Costal Studies, who offered to give him a spot on one of their research trips.
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…
One Year Anniversary
It seemed liked it was time to update the blog layout.
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.
Hurling: The Sport of Champions
The Irish History class at the high school staged a hurling game a couple weeks ago. I didn’t know a thing about this sport, other than that it’s in Irish game. It’s an odd combination of lacrosse, field hockey and baseball, and is older than all three by about a millennium. The kids made their own hurleys (sticks) in wood shop, and substituted a tennis ball for a regulation sliotar (I don’t know how to pronouce that…). I don’t think they’ll be joining a Gaelic league anytime soon…but this was very fun to photograph.
Middle School Basketball: In the Land of Giants
(I wish the high school gym had better lighting. Had to make these black and white because not even custom white balance was helping…)
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.
I’m very behind on blogging, and will try to get back up to speed this week…
Alpacas in the Snow!
I’ve been wanting to photograph alpacas in the snow since I first started my part-time job at the farm, and on Sunday, after we got 7 inches of snow here, I got my chance. I spent most of my shift shoveling the parking lot and making a pathway to the far barn, and…when I finally made it to the far barn, the herd of alpacas who live there decided that would be a great time to go explore their other pasture. And then they started frolicking around in the snow. Photo magic. I couldn’t have planned it better if I’d tried.
These were all shot with my 50mm.
Frolicking! Felix (the one in the middle) is such a little hambone.
Sledding in the First Snow
If you’re a little kid (heck, even if you’re a big kid), it must be the greatest feeling in the world to have the first snow day of the year come on a weekend. Especially if it’s a snow day that really does last all day—not just some measly little flurry that barely covers the ground.
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!