Trail of Tears Bike Ride

On Friday, June 28, a group of students and sponsors from Cherokee Territory in Oklahoma traveled to the Chief Vann House in Chatsworth, Ga., to start a bike ride that will follow the Trail of Tears back to their home. In 15-20 days, they will be back in Oklahoma. The group of students was really interested in learning more about their own history as the ride commemorated the 25th anniversary of the initial bike ride. 

One similar to the one below ran A1 of Georgia edition

Siskin Graduation

My first assignment at the Times Free Press was the graduation ceremony at the Siskin Institute, a school for children with learning disabilities. It was so much fun to see the students so excited and performing to the theme of the day, On Our Way.

This first photo of Classroom #5 performing is similar to the one that ran.

Chattanooga

On June 22, I began a six-month photojournalism internship with the Chattanooga Times Free Press. After the first three days, I was responsible for assignments and learning the ropes of being a staff photographer. The first days were challenging, and I suspect that the following months will be no different. 

The third day I was at the TFP, I was sent on the intern “park tour.” I had a few hours to find and create feature photos at three parks on different mountains in Georgia and Tennessee. I ran around for five hours straight, but came back with a couple successful shots, a few of which ran in the following days. A few shots from my inaugural solo trip through the mountains surrounding the Noog:

Chester Frost Park

Lookout Mountain Point Park

Chickamauga National Battlefield

The Big Picture: Dancing

The Big Picture is a blog run by a developer of the Boston Globe’s website, Alan Taylor. Published three times a week, the best photos pertaining to a certain subject are gathered and presented on the site (in the site’s words: “The Big Picture is intended to highlight high-quality, amazing imagery – with a focus on current events, lesser-known stories and, well, just about anything that comes across the wire that looks really interesting.”) A couple entries ago, the subject was Dance around the World. This subject intrigued me, and I found the photos to be so uplifting as the viewer can travel the world and see different, beautiful ways people and culture expresses itself through dance. I just thought I’d post the link–the photos are definitely worth looking at!

* Also the dancer on the left of #7 is Antonio. He danced in the same pre-professional company, Coca, in St. Louis, that I did growing up! He’s an amazing, talented dancer.

Little Brother of War

In April, Danielle Moore and I drove down to Mississippi for a Toli game between UGA’s Flying Rats (the only collegiate Toli team in the country) and the Choctaw Skunks. It was an eye-opening experience to watch a game rooted in history and to get a quick glimpse of life on the Choctaw reservations. The trip certainly reminded us of the great injustices done to Native Americans and inspired us to hopefully return someday soon to help record a beautiful culture that is slowly fading away. The Choctaw continue to speak their native Choctaw language and play Toli, or Stickball, a game that originally covered miles of ground, 100s of players, and more peacefully resolved arguments.

Danielle and I returned to write an article that centered on the relationship between the UGA team and the Choctaw team for the newspaper, as well as create an audio slideshow and video (one to accompany the Red&Black article and one as part of a class project,  A Day @ UGA). Click on the top link and scroll down towards the bottom for the video and slideshow–the name Hugh Lee in the slideshow should be Hugh King.

 

 

A Choctaw drummer takes after his father and beats to the rhythm of the Toli game.

Players from both sides jump in the air to control the ball after a point has been scored.

A UGA player repairs his stick during their pre-game practice.

 

Many more photos and video on the above links.

Semester Project

This semester in documentary photojournalism, our class, in collaboration with a social work students, worked throughout the semester to create a project that told 17 different Athenians who live in public housing’s stories. The goal of our project was to tell our “subject’s” story, through his or her own words. With 28% of Athens’ population living below the poverty line, this portion of the population is often talked about in the media, but they are not often heard. Through doing this we strove to break down some of the stereotypes that surround public housing and to give each of our subjects a chance to tell their own story–a story that deserves to be told.

The project was stressful but definitely worth the time and effort. Will Hill is who I worked with in creating this video. It was my first solo attempt at video, so it’s far from perfect. But it was fun not only shooting the project, but getting to know Will, who is a truly amazing person. He chose to stay in Rocksprings Community, where he was born and raised, in order to take care of his mother, aunt, and other elders in the community. He is constantly running errands for them or anyone else in the community that needs some help. While doing all of this, he is also trying to find time to help the youth in the community. With fond memories of his own childhood, he strives to bring back that some feeling of love that he believes made him who he is today. Check out all of our stories, presented in video and audio slideshows on http://givingvoiceto.us. Below is a shot of Will during one of my video interviews.

The Art of Aging

Throughout the semester, my documentary photojournalism class has been working on a rural health project with a graduate health & reporting class. In groups of 2-3, we tackled a county surrounding Athens-Clarke. I had Oconee County, an affluent county neighboring Athens. With an older population, we looked at elderly care, finding that the population was either wealthy enough to afford comfortable independent living or, for the most part, average and enjoyed resources of all kinds at senior centers. I focused on the benefits of artistic activities on the elderly, while the other two in my group looked at the benefits of staying social and staying active. The entire class’ projects are on the Grady Journal. Half of us did video, half audio slide show. I did a slide show, here. And, of course, some frames: 

Barney Roskopp, 86, began taking piano lessons 1 1/2 years ago simply because he has always loved classical music, the piano in particular, and had always wanted to learn how to play. 

 

Oconee County senior center is a haven for seniors looking to stay social and active. Many participate in crafts, including knitting and scrapbooking

Farida Salehbhai volunteered to teach knitting after she began attending the center:

Evelyn Hargrove quilts nearly every day:

Letitia Lumpkin has been quilting nearly her entire life, she proclaims that she simply “loves life:”

Woof woof woof for the home team

Yes, that’s a part of UGA’s 7th inning stretch. Shooting for sports comm has meant shooting a lot of baseball. Here are some shots from the season so far:

 vs. Clemson

Cone’s Nice Catch

The same night: Poythress’s HR

 

& a view of First with Esmonde pitching

Out-of-conference games

First conference home series vs. Mississippi State

Record-setting crowd:

(yes, they stopped the game to hand him his beer back from left field)

LSU Series

vs. Georgia Tech

vs. Kennesaw

After Poythress’s 2nd of 3 HRs this night

His little brother was batboy for the night

There are many more photos on www.georgiadogs.com.

And an article in the AJC about Poythress’s record game. 

And, I got a second photo in the article as well!

Central Park Carousel

Just got back from a trip to New York City (which was amazing).  I haven’t gotten a chance to go through many photos, but I love this one of two friends riding the carousel in Central Park and thought I’d put it up here. It’s the fastest and certainly most fun carousel ever.

PJ Workshop ‘09

University of Georgia photojournalism workshop: A weekend full of pj discussion, critique and general chitchat with a group of dedicated and all-around wonderful photojournalists. The three days were amazing learning and discussing the past, present and future of the field. The best part, however, was just being around the inspiring personalities inside, but more so, outside the classroom. A lot of these are just for fun, but taken throughout the weekend.

A quick coffee run became pretty interesting after Dave and John showed up. Here, we practiced shooting some video while Dave made new friends.

New friends:

Being an entertaining practice subject:

The final day, Frannie, Rachel, Charles Ryan, Seth and I went shooting around downtown Athens with John and Mike.

Shooting from the top of the parking deck:

Back on street level, Jimbo was playing some Dylan, among other tunes. After three weeks in Athens, he was leaving the next day to head north to Chicago.

Old friends:

The spirit of the weekend: