2016 Year in Review

Happy New Year! I really enjoyed 2016 and have a bunch of new developments in my photo and video work to share.

I started the year off heading down to New York City to tag along and film some footage of one of Harvard Business School's Immersive Field Courses. Every year, HBS student take off for various locations around the world to take part in this experience and my footage from New York was incorporated into the final overview video.

An Immersive Field Course (IFC) provides second year MBA students with the opportunity to meet protagonists face-to-face, put theory into practice, and push their boundaries outside of the classroom. Hear directly from students and faculty about what makes these experiences so special.

In February, I headed off on another trip to Central America. I returned to Nicaragua to continue working on my photo story on a former gang member who now works with kids.

While in Nicaragua, I also continued my tradition of posting to Instagram once a day and built up a great collection of images. I was really pleased when a selection of iPhone shots from my travels was recently published on the website Passion Passport. You can read the full story here: http://passionpassport.com/central-america-by-iphone/

After Nicaragua, I continued on to El Salvador, where I worked with Ian MacLellan to film a video for the non-profit Epilogos. Epilogos has a wonderful story. It was started by a couple, Mike and Susie Jenkins who returned to El Salvador after being stationed there in the Peace Corps and lived and worked in the community of San Jose Villanueva for 14 years.

This video highlights the achievements of Mike & Susie Jenkins and the Epilogos Charities Inc. non-profit organization, working in San Jose Villanueva, culminating in a 50th wedding anniversary celebration of the Jenkins in February 2016.

Working in El Salvador was a wonderful experience and it was great to get a chance to experience a different country in Central America. The people were very friendly and welcoming but it was heartbreaking to see the level of violence they are forced to deal with in their daily lives.

When I returned to Boston in the spring, I had a lot of fun shooting a whirlwind of events for MIT as they celebrated 100 years in Cambridge.

And throughout the year, I've continued to shoot portraits of students and faculty for MIT News, assignments which I always enjoy.

During the summer, I put some serious effort into adding to my travel portfolio and had a lot of fun shooting in Maine, New Hampshire and on Cape Cod.

And for the third year now, I got to spend a good portion of the summer hanging out with kids while shooting summer school photos for the non-profit Boston After School & Beyond.

Towards the end of the summer, I really enjoyed taking a trip up to Contoocook, New Hampshire to produce a video on a liturgical candlemaker who had gotten into beekeeping.

Martin Marklin took up beekeeping as a sideline to his main business producing thousands of handcarved liturgical candles each year at the Marklin Candle workshop in Contoocook, New Hampshire. Beekeeping became its own vocation, however, and the more Marklin learned about the life of bees, the more he saw the ways in which the beehive reflects the early church. Now Marklin sees the beehive as a metaphor for life in the Christian community.

In the fall, during the run-up to the election I shot videos on a range of political topics for both the Edward M. Kennedy Institute and Moveon.org.

I'm starting off 2017 by heading first to Nicaragua to do some photo/video work for a new non-profit I've become involved with called Women's Worth. And then I'll be spending the month of February traveling in India. You can follow my travels on my Instagram where I hope to have lots of new images to share with you soon. Have a great new year!