MV Gazette

XC Invitational + Soccer

Posted by Ivy

In addition to my regular photo and semi-regular photoreporting duties, I’m now the official High School Sports Reporter. At least until the end of the month, after which…I really don’t know what’s happening. I’ll keep you posted!

This weekend there was an invitational cross country meet and a girls’ soccer game. I haven’t shot cross country (or, “How many different ways can you shoot people running?”) since, well, high school, and soccer has never been my thing, so I was happy to have the chance to get more chances to shoot the sports.

I’m also a fan of working the high school beat because my cousin is a sophomore at the school and knows EVERYBODY (plus, she was on the cross country team last year). Not hard to do when you’ve grown up with everybody on this tiny island, but man, does it make figuring out names that much easier. Thanks, Texe!

Teammates cheer on Michael Osborn as he wins the JV race.

Kassidy Bettencourt outpaces her opponent to the finish line.

Thorpe Karabees nears the end of the JV race. (P.S. What is the finger thing he’s doing? Is that a runner thing?)

Emily Cimeno and Shelby Ferry congratulate Sam Oslyn on his medal.

Max Miner crosses the finish line in the boys varsity race.

I like this one the best, since it also sums up the game (in which the Vineyard defense was pushed to the brink by the North Plymoth power offense) nicely.

Hell Week

Posted by Ivy

I don’t know how high schoolers do it.

Last fall I did a project for Picture Story about the Hickman High band, which practices four times a week at 6:30 in the morning. So I had to get up at unseemly hours just to get myself up to the school (this was before I had a car, so I had to walk). But I was only doing that for a week, not a whole football season. I don’t think I have that kind of motivation.

Of course, then, I was assigned to do a story about Hell Week at MVRHS- which is when the athletes do their preseason training. The field hockey team starts practice–yes, starts–at 5:45 in the morning. They don’t stop until past 8:15. The soccer teams are a little more sane; they start at 6:30. But still!

I admit I gave up completely on the 5:45 thing (reason #2353 why I don’t play field hockey). That was when I headed out the door to go up to the practice. (Besides, the light’s terrible at 5:45…right? right?).

This was taken WITH the lens hood on. Yep.

Drafting Details

Posted by Ivy

I know, I know, my last two posts have been livestock photos. But it’s fair season; I can’t really help it. I’m going to post the non-animal photos from the fair in the next couple of days (:

Anyway.

I probably would have photographed this event even if I weren’t covering the fair for the paper. Draft horses are some of the most awesome creatures on earth, as far as I’m concerned. I think this is because I have an idea in my head of what a horse should be—what its proportions are, how big it is, etc, etc—and every time I see a draft horse in person it just blows this concept right out of the water. Every time! You’d think I would have altered the preconception to include draft horses, but I guess things don’t work like that.

On that note, here are some images from the draft horse pull yesterday afternoon. I left when the teams’ load got up to 8800 pounds (EIGHTY EIGHT HUNDRED POUNDS! Unreal).

Ambivalent Piggies

Posted by Ivy

Okay, guys. We all know how cute piglets are, and if you’ve ever seen ‘racing pigs,’ then you know how cute they are, too.

But this just takes it to a whole new level.

I’m the designated ‘Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Fair’ shooter this weekend, so I was up at the fairgrounds for a while this afternoon. I was about to try getting on the Ferris wheel for an overhead shot when I saw the crowd for the racing pigs, and detoured. This was a good decision.

After a couple of land races, the ante was upped by adding WATER to the course–the piglets had to swim through a little pool before getting to the Oreo treat at the end. The first group, which were Florida hoglets, were totally unbothered by this and just plunged right in.

But the next set, the Yorkshire piglets, didn’t want anything to do with the swimming pool (one of them actually cheated and zipped back to the starting gate before the handler could stop him).


And then…triumph!

5 Points of View- Chicken Day at North Tabor Farm

Posted by Ivy

Picture Story class last fall prepared me for a lot of things, but one of the most unexpected benefits of the class was going through desensitivity (is that a word?) training with regard to bloody animals. One of my classmates did a project on the butcher class in the ag school, while another did a long-term project on girls and guns…which included deer and duck hunting.

I’m not particularly bothered by graphic images of carnage to begin with; I don’t eat meat and never have (I do eat seafood, and sometimes fish), so it isn’t as though photos can turn off my appetite- because I never had one to begin with. So I was more interested than disgusted when I got sent to find photographs to go along with a story on the mobile chicken processing plant here on the Island. The chickenmobile (as I like to call it) goes around to farms and provides the equipment for the farmer to safely and cleanly process chickens for sale at the markets here.

I went to the Saturday morning farmer’s market and found the North Tabor Farm people, who were having the chickenmobile come by that afternoon. I think I did a decent job of taking it all in, even though I found that I couldn’t watch when the actual slitting happens. That was a little too much.

This part gets kind of bloody, so it’s under a cut- my five points of view of chicken day.


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Little League 101

Posted by Ivy

I did a piece on the Little League All-Star teams this past weekend (I had to file the story from the Falmouth Public Library and the photos from Wickford, RI, which made things, um, interesting)…nothing too in-depth, but it did take a lot of running around and pestering phone calls to make sure all four teams (9, 10, 11, and 12-year-olds) were represented in the article.

The whole process was made infinity times easier by the fact that I now have a CAR! I’m going to blog about this specifically sometime soon, as it truly warrants more attention. I can’t believe I have a car. It’s fantastic.

Anyway. These are all from practices; since the teams are by nature travel squads, all of their games are tournaments on the mainland, and I couldn’t get to any of them (darn it!) to take photos of actual competition…

Nothing like getting up to take a 7:45 boat off-Island for a tournament…

Sometimes I miss the days of non-Facebook birthday party invitations

Meals in the Meadow, part two

Posted by Ivy

I don’t usually turn my 20mm vertically, because of the distortion factor. But as David Rees says, distortion can be a good thing when it’s used with a purpose…such as, for instance, emphasizing just how big a huge one-ton ox (who kept trying to eat my camera) really is. This photo was taken at the Meals in the Meadow dinner last Saturday.

I wish there was a little more space between Adair’s arm and Jaeli’s head, but overall am pretty happy with the way this photo turned out (are you at all bothered by the feet (and hooves) being cut off? It kind of bothers me, but not enough to kill the overall image).

Long live the wide-angle (-: