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Group to Organize photography outings!

HI all- I've just made a facebook group with the aims of getting out in Boston more- right now several festivals are posted- some great material for photo essays. Check it out here:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=126112149180

And please friend me/email me/ call me if you want to come with me to anything or have questions.

I'd be really willing to give some photo lessons while we're out in a no pressure type environment as well!

First Week in Kisumu, Kenya

I've been in Kenya for almost two weeks now working for CLEAR, a pro-bono legal advocacy and education group. I'm based in Kisumu for six weeks, then I'll be in Eldoret for a bit, Mombassa for a week, and back in Nairobi for a week before returning home. On my first real day in Kisumu, I was working inside the local maximum security prison... since then I've been followed for a few miles, had a local hacker named Neo offer his services to me on two occasions, which includes ICBM sequence coding(just for G8 and Israel though), EMP transmission and halt, realtime network timeline pausing, and G20 defense sequence coding, met a Fletcher graduate through twitter keyword following, who is working on advanced cell phone technology in East Africa, gotten the Muslim print journalist I'm with in serious trouble, because I'm not a Muslim, been the first atheist dozens of people in Kenya have ever met, missed real internet where you can actually upload images and check your email, been to a local language radio show, been offered jobs taking pictures for dozens of NGOs, met a man named Henry Kissinger, gone to Kenyan court, learned ~50 words in Luo, been forced to walk really slow, had my video camera broken by another NGO worker, ate lots of Indian food, and spent less than $0.25 USD mutliple days in a row.

This is "Obama's Homeland" and he is more present than the British Queen. Peter, a CLEAR advocate, waits for the start of his Luo radio show on legal issues.

Outside the courthouse in Oyugis where a CLEAR advocate was representing a young girl in a defilement case. The case was delayed more than a month, after the defendant's lawyer was sick and couldn't attend. The young girl and her family travelled hours to attend court as did the advocate from CLEAR.

A Matatu ride outside Kisumu. Matatu's are probably the most efficient system in Kisumu. They are privately owned buses with "routes" and general rates. Though they always try and charge us 3-4x as much until we start telling them in Luo we know the price is lower.

CLEAR has a growing number of Law Clubs in local High Schools to help educate the populous on their rights and produce the next batch of legal-do-gooders.

CLEAR advocate Joan Neto is providing legal aid to a man named Henry Kissinger. Kissinger is attempting to organize a community response to dying fisheries in Lake Victoria by implementing new forms of sustainable agriculture. Kissinger's 104 year old grandmother insisted on posing for a picture.

Fishing traps are almost a relic from the past for Lake Victoria.

The view from outside the CLEAR office as a thunderstorm rolls in over Kisumu.

A young woman inside the Kisumu Children's Remand Home during The Day of the African Child celebrations. CLEAR represents some of the juveniles and was a partner in the day's celebrations.

Young men and women wait patiently for rare candy and juice at the Kisumu Children's Remand Home. Meat was also a rare luxury in honor of the celebration. Aprroximately 20% of the children are here because of criminal charges such as murder or stealing while the rest are just here because they were caught as street children or taken from their families because of improper care.

stories of palestinians

there is a program called b'tselem, an israeli information center for human rights in the occupied territories. one of their projects entail issuing of video and photographic equipment to palestinian families who live near military outposts, settlements, checkpoints, etc. the purpose of course is for them to document their life. these people share their stories, which can be harrowing and difficult to watch. i met with heshem yesterday to listen to what he had to say about living so perilously close to one of the most fanatic settlers. he showed me several videos of the jewish settlers calling him and his family 'nazis' and listening to threats such as 'i will come later with men and rape your women' as the IDF soldiers stand by while the attacks occur.

this topic is controversial but everyone deserves to share their point of view and have their voices heard. b'tselem is by no means the only human rights watch group for the occupied territories but it's the most hands-on approach that i have seen during my visits. for more information visit their website: b'tselem.

What to bring on a photo trip...

I think about these sorts of things all the time and I doubt I'm the only one. So in case anyone is curious here is my list for 2+months in Kenya working for two human rights organizations. Everybody likes to have different things and have different amounts of money available to them so I doubt anyone else could bring this exact set and be happy. This list would be way more expensive if I decided to buy a new macbook pro with CS 4 or the best canon bodies and lenses or fanciest audio recording equipment, but I could also slim down and bring cheaper and less equipment, like only one camera body and two lenses. Maybe this represents some sort of middle ground to show what "real people" bring? It is also a middle ground between being daring in terms of safety of information and equipment and being over protective with 5 backup hard drives and pelican hard cases for everything from lenses to pencils.

Cameras and lenses:

Pentax k10d(both my camera bodies are “weatherproof” and generally pretty tough. I’m used to Pentax and really like their color representation and they fit beautifully in my hands. It really doesn’t matter what bodies you use these days, a Nikon D90, D300, or D5000 or Canon 40d or 50d are all pretty similar)

Pentax k20d(just got this woot!)

Sigma 30mm 1.4(also just got this woot!)

Sigma 105mm 2.8

Sigma 10-20mm 4-5.6

Sigma 17-70mm 2.8-4.5

Sigma 135-400 4.5-5.6(this lens would be awesome except there isn’t a lock so the zoom slides out. It’s also a little slow, but it’s cheap and if by some freak accident I get to go on a free safari it would be very useful. A 70-200mm 2.8 would probably be a more useful lens)

Ricoh R8 point and shoot(it’s my backup just in case and it can shoot video for multimedia productions. I like it because of its wide angle lens and wide range of zoom. I wouldn’t mind having a new Canon g10 though…)

Storage:

3xSandisk 8gb Extreme III

2xSandisk 4gb Extreme III 30mb/s(these are super sweet!)

3 or 4 other random sd cards

2xBuffalo ministation 500gb externals(they are cheap and wicked small and light!)

Computer stuff:

Ibm Lenovo x60 laptop(A macbook pro would be cool too but they are expensive and big at least my Ibm has 4gb ram and a 60gb hard drive and xp instead of vista.)

T-shirt as a laptop case(I almost bought a fancy hard pelican case but decided that would make it look too fancy and somebody would steal it)

Adobe Photoshop 7(It’s not that I don’t want a fancy cs version, it’s just that I have never been able to afford it or I don’t wanna steal it…)

SoundsSlides Pro(I haven’t used this yet, but I have seen great things from it)

Audacity audio editor(Don’t really know much about audio, so I figure this is a good enough place to learn. Maybe someday I’ll buy Adobe Audition)

Firefox

Open Office

Skype

Optical mouse

Audio recording equipment:

Olympus WS-331M Digital Voice Recorder(This is a voice recorder and most “professional types” would recommend something like an Edirol or Marantz because they are much stronger recorders, but run closer to $400 while mine was ~$110)

Sony ECM-DS70P Electret Condenser Stereo Microphone(this microphone is much smaller and lighter than a real microphone, although the quality isn’t as nice as a Sennheiser)

Headphones

Luggage:

REI Venturi backpack(This is a larger metal frame pack that keeps cameras and lenses from poking into your back. It’s also nice for warm weather because the pack doesn’t physically rest against your back)

Camelbak backpack(This pack is 5 or so years old and has years of fading that make it nice and inconspicuous…)

Accessories and random stuff:

6 rechargeable batteries for my Pentax DSLRs(They are cheap, so why not be careful?)

2 battery chargers

Pelican sd card case(these are really cute. They are crushproof and waterproof and hold 8 sd cards securely)

Wireless shutter release

2xPentax 540 flash

2 el cheapo ebay wireless flash triggers(These don’t compare to Pocket Wizards, but are significantly smaller and a tenth of the price)

Unlocked Motorola Razr

Guidebooks and maps of Kenya

Notebooks for taking names and contact information as well as to keep details about day to day happenings

Medicine

Clothes

Sunscreen

Bugspray

Driftless Stories from Iowa Documentary

"Driftless: Stories from Iowa by Danny Wilcox Frazier
As the economies of rural communities across America fail, abandonment is becoming commonplace. Driftless explores a Midwest that resides in shadows, a people quietly enduring America's new economic reality. See the project at http://mediastorm.org/0025.htm "

MediaStorm is a photojournalism project sponsored by The Washington Post that uses some of the best in the business(especially Tim Hussin as their intern...) to promote advances in media representation of photojournalism by utilizing audio and video and creating some of the best multimedia productions out there.

First Person Arts National Competition on Documenting the Modern Depression

The First Person Arts contest is looking for photographs, films, and writing that show how modern Americans are coping with the economic difficulties of 2009. The end goal of the project is to have stories from all 50 states. The last day for submissions is June 30, 2009. I know a bunch of you had been talking about pursuing projects with the same theme and thought maybe this would be an appropriate venue to show them to the wider world?

Eddie Adams Submissions Are Due May 11th

This is the best tuition free workshop for photojournalism students and young professional journalists. All it takes to apply is 20 photos, a personal statement, and $45... so why not? It's October 9-12th and could be an amazing experience to meet other fresh photojournalists as well as seasoned veterans.

Apply online here

I'm just starting my application tonight, but it has been on my to do list of things I have always wanted to do...

LRA conflict

An excellent photo essay on the Lord's Resistance Army conflict in Northern Uganda by Dima Gavrysh.

Burn Magazine.

"Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable"

This is a pretty great blog post about what it is we can know for sure about the coming, almost-post-newspaper journalistic bonanza/consumptive frenzy. Clay Shirky's a good author you may or may not be aware of (he wrote a book about these sorts of things called Here Comes Everybody), and people, or, rather, their websites have been making a great deal of noise about this article.