LaurieWrites

Donors Choose Challenge: Life Through a Lens

I wrote the post below on BlogHer. I am helping out with the Donors Choose Challenge. Please consider donating to one of our projects. I'm partial to the one I picked out. : )

Photography changed my life. My first photography teacher told us that photographs give us the most accurate record of our lives, and I believe this more and more the longer I devote myself to picture-taking. This is why I love looking at other peoples' photographs as much as taking my own, and I especially love to see young people excited about photography. So when the opportunity arose to join my fellow BlogHer contributors in the 2008 Donors Choose.org Bloggers' Challenge, specifically to support putting cameras in the hands of young people to help them tell their stories, I was immediately on board. 

The Life Through a Lens project in Mr. Russo's classroom was just what I wanted to support. His proposal was solid and detailed. He had obviously put a lot of thought and care into the project. Also, he was close to home in case he allowed me to come and take pictures of the kids.

Mr. R teaches middle school art to what he says are "at-risk students" in a high poverty traditional Maryland middle school. Here's how he explains what they need:

We need cameras! We need beginner, but high quality cameras to get the ball rolling. Our students love to photograph and be photographed, and this gift will help make that happen. We want our students to know, not only that this technology is within their reach, but also how to use it give them voices that many people will hear.

Your help will bring us one step closer to empowering to students with that voice. We at this school think that the time is now to help guide these students into a culturally rich and fulfilling life. We want our students to show the world through their pictures what life here means and what being at this school, at this time is all about.

What do they need? 5 easy-to-use, reliable digital cameras, for a total of $850.

Easy peasy.

You can donate on the Donors Choose site,  and see the other projects BlogHer editors are sponsoring here. Mr. R says,

Resources are slim here, but we truly want to provide the richest educational and art experiences possible. We believe our students deserve all of the best. 

That's the truth. Again, says Mr. R.,

"We want our students to show the world through their pictures what life here means and what being at this school, at this time is all about."

Powerful stuff. I hope we can help them tell the world what life there means. 

Meanwhile, for some inspiration to check out: 

Photographer Marcia Tumminaro just started teacing photography classes at her child's school. 

Amazing story of UNICEF's effort to bring cameras to kids in South Africa, some of whom were seeing cameras for the first time in their lives.

Teaching Digital Photography: Showing Young People How to See With the Camera's Eye. 

Maryland-based Vision Workshops provides photography camps and extended learning opportunities in communities around the world. 

Two steps forward

Sorry, I know it's been heavy around here. But yay! I'm going to Denver!

"Once you're there, you will be credentialed press and you will be
working every day. All day. Hard. Conventions are an *extreme* amount
of fun, but it's not a junket.

Stories will move on the Capital News Service wire, so in addition to
having a great experience and a great line for your resume, you'll get
some good clips, too."

I've never been to Colorado and since I'm a geek who's hellbent on seeing all 50 states in my lifetime I love adding a new one to the list. I also hear this convention might be a little bit important. Hmm?

There's so much going on and I have a feeling that things will look so different for me this time next year, but I have no idea how that'll be. I am so impatient.

I also got the check today for the first photography assignment for an event that I handled all by myself, from shooting to editing to prints. It was more than we agreed upon, too, because he was happy with my work. I hate talking about money and how much I should be paid for stuff like this because I shoot so much that it's crazy to get paid for it, but it really did feel good. One of my goals for May is to get an Etsy store up with some prints, but I really need time to do that and I haven't had a whole lot of that. I'm motivated to do it though, and it's pretty easy to set up a storefront for any kind of art there. If I was a better web designer I'd put my own gallery up but I have a feeling I'll go super micro and focused about that, which means it'll take me a long time.

Not so bad for a little old Thursday.

(hopefully) Hanoi Rocks

I am going to Vietnam for ten days in March.

I am so excited. I just don't think this is a place I would have taken myself, at least not with any great confidence. I have never been to Asia, and have always been interested in traveling there, and it will be great to go with a purpose and a construct for the trip, and a charge to tell stories about the places and people. This will be happening in the context of a semester-long international reporting class. We'll study Vietnam for the first part of the semester, go there over spring break, and then come back and write (hopefully) publishable pieces. They wanted a mix of print, broadcast and online people. It shocks me like few things do that I am one of three people that I know in my program in the online concentration. THREE. This really shocks me. I truly love print newspapers. Reading the paper, as in holding it in my hand and reading it has been one of my most consistent daily activities over the course of my life. The Washington Post is "my" paper and has been since my grandfather used to bring it home every day, because he had to take a special trip to get it. I don't know if it was ever sent to the house. He just bought it every day when he worked, and then when he retired he had to go to get lottery tickets and "a Post paper" every day. There used to be two papers in the city, and in that case he'd buy the Washington Star, before it stopped publishing when I was a kid.

This is where it started. When I first hit a city I get a newspaper. My whole family reads the Myrtle Beach Sun-Times every day on summer vacation. When my Aunt Dot was at the beach full-force on our big family trip, she'd go down and get the USA Today and the Sun-Times, and drop them off on the doormat of everyone's condo unit. As family members trickled down who maybe had to work over the weekend and couldn't get there until Monday or Tuesday, they'd bring multiple copies of the Post and it would get passed around on the beach, people rushing to claim the crossword puzzle. So I come by it genetically I guess.

I even read the Dayton Daily News every day, and loved it for what it was, which was a truly Dayton paper. I worked at Barnes & Noble where we'd get the Sunday papers from major cities on Monday or Tuesday, and I paid triple the cost of the Sunday Post many weeks of the five years that I lived in Ohio, when the news was a couple days old, just so I could get Book World and the magazine. I LOVE being in cities where I don't live on Sundays, because a Sunday newspaper is like the heart of a town for me, and I like to pretend that I really live there and go to a coffee shop and read the paper. I've done this in Tampa, Chicago, Phoenix and Austin, among other places. And therein you have a window to my strange little soul, and also confirmation that I am really quite easily satisfied.

But as much as I love the actual paper, which I've ended up writing about more than I intended, I am also completely fascinated by and obsessed with, I'll admit, the immediacy of the online environment and what that means for telling stories. So when I talked to the director about this trip, I said I wanted to take photos (on my mythical D80 which now really, really has to happen) and video, and also set up a website, and she was all excited about it. Like it was hard. ;) I honestly think that's a big reason why I'm going, because of my desire and ability to capture the experience on film and in posts. But my new theory is that as long as people view this audiovisual stuff as difficult, I'll have a gig. And whether it's hard or not, mechanically speaking, what matters is that you have a better than average eye, and aren't afraid to take the pictures in unfamiliar places. That, admittedly, is more challenging, and what is thoroughly charging me up about the prospect of this trip.

This is really, really why I went back to school. I didn't set out to go to Vietnam, specifically, or really to travel anywhere, although I admit I was hoping that was going to be part of it somehow, I just didn't know where or when. I've embraced ambiguity on so many complex levels at this point that I'm much more comfortable answering questions with "I don't know," and I mostly don't mind if people aren't satisfied with that answer. I'm still working on whether I'm okay with it, and that takes up enough space that I'm not interested in inviting other people beyond my most important family and friends into my daily psychodrama at this point. ;) But it's amazing that what has been often said to me is true, that when you just jump in, stuff happens. Pretty basic. The hard part is the waiting for it, whatever it is that signifies to you that this, this stuff is the good stuff - the stuff for which all other (often aggravating, boring, daily grind stuff) is preamble. And I just have to say, I am COMPLETELY RIDICULOUSLY FUCKING AMPED about this particular STUFF, and a little bit embarrassed because like Wilbur the pig I am grossly humble, to say that I'm proud of myself for taking the chances I've taken in the past couple years, which have more or less amounted to putting one foot in front of the other lots of times when I was scared out of my anxiety-ridden little mind, and thought I was too old, and thought I was too scared of flying, or whatever.

And I'm also completely grateful to my university, it must be said, who let me back in to get this show back on the road, and who will be paying the freight for us to go, plus for a hotel in Hanoi and translators, who will come in very handy, and also for breakfast every day, I think.

When I sent in the university application forms, I had no conscious knowledge that this was a workable or advisable plan. I just did it knowing it had to be done, because as interesting and thrill-ride-like as I seem hellbent on making a standard trip to the mall, I didn't want to be the same anymore. I knew that the next act, as it were, had to be different, that I had to work that other 80 percent of my brain that maybe was left a little softer than it should be, and mostly deal with a nameless, faceless fear that seemed to have become my primary driver. I needed to go beyond the confines of comfort, outside of familiar mental geography, if not physical, and complete the only thing in my life that I really regretted that was within my control - finishing school. It shocked me when people assumed they knew stuff about me that to me was never a done deal. I never intended to just stay here, although there's nothing really wrong with that either, so there. You can do amazing things up the street as well as you can do them all over the world. There is no point to prove.

We won't have press visas so it's not like I can do any huge expose of anything, and that's not really the kind of story I tell anyway. I'd be happy to write about Vietnamese musicians, or street artists, or what it's like to be over 30 and single in a society that's really just taken off economically - for some? (key words.) I want to take as many pictures or more as I write words. By the end of March I guess I'll know how it should all come together. I have a lot of work to do for this.

Here I am, feverishly researching whether or not there's a Starbucks in Hanoi. Priorities, must attend to priorities:

 

So now I need to ask for a Vietnamese language program for my birthday, because I have no idea how to even begin with that part. I'm poking around on Flickr (the greatest invention ever) through the hundreds of thousands of photos tagged with Vietnam and Hanoi and Saigon and on and on and on. My very best friend called to tell me that she was so happy that I was in such a different place than I was this time last year, namely a spot from which to handle the things that still suck in a way that is much more hopeful and always with an eye on what doesn't. My mother has (typically) already called the lady who does her nails who is lined up to give me tips on street bargaining. And I kind of love that my family and friends have started wondering where the hell I'll end up next. And that I don't know either.

Brought to you by the letter "O".

No, not THAT one. What kind of a page do you think this is?

(No answers, please.)

Thanks to Courtney the Wiccan Verizon supervisor (that's what the "Blessed be" necklace means, right?) I am now the proud owner, until I break or lose it, of the EnV! Also, it is orange.

My phone

matches my CAR. And no, I do not know why that photo won't flip. I DO NOT KNOW.

 

It's really bothering me though. I've only been screwing around with this webpage for two and a half years. That's all. Just more than two years, not at all enough time to FIGURE ANYTHING OUT.

Anyway, my phone is orange. It also has a 2.0 meg camera, which is going to be fun. And A KEYBOARD.

I am unstoppable. And also will officially have no capacity to focus on anything for more than the dwindling minutes I'm down to. It kills me that it's the EnV model, because that's the silliest thing I've ever heard, but whatever. A  functional camera and a keyboard, and it's orange.

Courtney, I need to say, is awesome. She singlehandedly made up for all of my pent-up hatred towards Verizon, because guess WHAT? She was REASONABLE. She was PLEASANT. She was RESPONSIVE. I didn't have to lose my cool even a little bit, even just inside. I didn't have to think bad things, not for one second. She just handled it. She saw that I had a problem. She responded to my e-mail when I wrote her to set up a time to come in, and she said, "I look forward to solving your problem." I think she even meant it.

And then she listened to me, which admittedly can be a little bit challenging when I'm in a state of this sort (No phone! Not responding other than e-mail to story needs and sources calling me back! For a week! No money to deal with unexpected technical glitches! Driving around in traffic that sucks as much as anything can! And also? cold! COLD! no heat in my house cold! I'm charming, no matter how hard I try...)

She listened without her wheels visibly turning on her face about how she was going to refute all of my "issues" (I hate that word) by quoting line item 27 from page 372 of the employee manual. She noted that this was my THIRD iteration of the SAME phone in less than a year. She didn't ask me if I'd jammed pliers into the slot where the charger element was, although it clearly looked like I'd either done that, or opened up the phone body itself and bit down really hard on it, stuck in my car in this demon traffic and totally hungry for some electronic equipment. She just nodded, and said clearly I'd had some "trouble with this device" and they'd be happy to switch it up.

And when she finally asked me if the newest LG model was okay as a replacement, and I managed to squeak out that I would sorta kinda really be down with the nicer orange phone with the keyboard and the camera?

She said, "One moment please, let's just walk over here," and came back and said, "It's only twenty dollars more. I will gladly change you to that phone, even exchange. No problem."

Seriously. This never happens. I didn't even care that they took all my text messages off that I kept meaning to transcribe  (because let me tell you, some of that shit is classic, although perhaps best left to the ether) and my pictures, and my crazily blown up list of contacts, but that's my fault because I didn't run the backup. Run the backup on your contacts, people. Take it from me, because the very day your phone dies is the day you need to talk to the most obscure person whose number you saved accidentally on purpose.

Courtney is a retail rock star. Maybe it's her necklace that gives her super powers, I don't know. But if it wasn't kind of weird and might could get me cited for some random infraction of the customer/supervisor separation rule, I'd bring her brownies or a Bath and Body Works gift basket or something.

Thank you Wiccan Courtney, high priestess of Verizon, for my kickass orange phone. And may it not break before July when I'm allowed to re-up for real, because I swear I'll snap like a twig. I won't want to, but I will.

Blogher Podcasts - Green Light

I was the lead on recording the closing keynote at Blogher. My role on this crew meant that I wore headphones for two days and fiddled with knobs to KEEP THE GREEN LIGHT ON, for God's sake, KEEP THE GREEN LIGHT ON. I was so terrified of the orange and the red lights popping up on the machine that I sat on the edge of my seat, literally, for the first day I did this. And since this was truly a grassroots operation (that didn't act or feel amateurish, really, because of the excellent people involved.) we had several different models of recorders. So when I'd go into a room, there might be a totally different type of machine, with different kinds of knobs and buttons that I wasn't sure were the right ones to push and the GREEN LIGHT IN A DIFFERENT PLACE. Horror. 

But every time I finished a session with one of my fellow pod people, we ended up with a new disk to give to Toy, so that meant there was something concrete that came out of it. Of course, every time I turned one over I had to also turn over my fear that this one would be the blank one...that the green light, in this case, had lied.

It was so much fun to have been a part of creating this. It's amazing how sensitive recordings are to different vocal pitches, as well as volumes, and where one person's voice would make your recorder perfectly happy, another person's voice would send it into RED LIGHT RED LIGHT DANGER DANGER GREEN LIGHT IS GONE MODE. You have to be really precise and really responsive to make sure that it ends up sounding like all the people were in the same room, at least - especially if, as in many cases here, a microphone is weaving through the crowd and people are actually, frighteningly, speaking into it. I'm not a detail person, typically, but I liked the challenge of following the proceedings and responding to the changes in the sounds I was hearing. It was fun in a very obsessive-compulsive sort of way.

My worst fear of a blank disk at least didn't come true for this closing session, which was a pretty important one since it featured Arianna Huffington, and Grace Davis, and Mena Trott, and Washington Post/ Newsweek Interactive CEO Caroline Little (moderated by Chris Nolan.) I'm really happy about that. Toy had to have polished them up with her considerable editing skill, but at least my levels, as Kirk put it, do seem to have been okay.

I think I'm going to go talk into a tape recorder now. And if I'm taping you, I promise to wear the big headphones so you'll know.

SXSW

I'm not going to SXSW Interactive, which I'm very bummed about, but I find myself on the website quite a bit, because there's just so much interesting information there. (The music and  film conferences take place during the same timeframe, so Austin is definitely the place to be from March 10 - 19.)

Just listed today, the finalists for the web awards at interactive are full of great options for time-wasting, even with a little bit of useful information thrown in here and there.

Blogher also got a shout-out on the festival's website, for helping to raise the number of female panelists 50 percent this year, to 120. I'm already excited to be a part of the site, and it's cool to see us taking part in other fun, high-profile events. Must. Go. Next. Year.

Happy Little Panda

Panda love.

It's been years since the "panda watch" occupied the news all the time around here, so it was fun to check the Post home page this morning and find out that Mei Xiang had a baby! From what I read, it's extremely difficult for pandas to conceive. The female is fertile three days a YEAR. Hence, no market for panda condoms. And lots of frustrated boy pandas, because she wants nothing to do with him for another 362 days. "I said back on up, Tian Tian. Do you HEAR me? Do not even THINK of coming near THIS panda bear. Go on back to your bamboo pile and that silly TIRE. Back it on UP." Haha. Turns out Mei Xiang (say that three times fast) was artificially inseminated, and then they couldn't even tell if she was pregnant for sure, because false positive pregnancy tests are rampant in pandas. It's also very difficult for them to carry a baby to term, and then, once they've made it past those trials, to keep them alive for more than a few days after birth. The mom is in serious danger of crushing them accidentally! It makes me wonder if the universe really wants pandas to survive. I mean, why so difficult? Also, it seems that pandas are very crafty. They don't so much care if the little veterinarian people know if there's a panda in the oven or not. Keep 'em guessing. "Yes," Mei Xiang thought. "I will just CRADLE this nice APPLE here, and see the humans freak out with their video cameras and sonogram machines. Yessssss."

  Not really. But they do dig their down time. The Post article says that no one "dares go near" the mother and baby at "this delicate time", stating immediately thereafter that Mei Xian "weighs 250 pounds," which isn't terribly sensitive. I mean, can't a girl get some privacy?  I'm sure there's many a human mother who wishes no one would dare go near her either - no video cameras, no people waving, no one wanting you to pose for pictures while your INSIDES ARE SPLIT IN HALF. ; ) 

Here's a photo of a panda at the San Diego zoo who made it. Based on the odds, he rocks. He's tough as nails. Look at him - he'll take you out! Plus, how sweet he is. I do hope this new little one survives. 

If I didn't already want to move there...

I think this is great.

With George Bush still in office and the weird state-by-state laws and protests to compare it to here (a country I love regardless, of course, don't be mistaken...The right would have us believe that we're all USA-haters, the vestiges of absolutist thinking that's gotten us into these pickles in the first place), Canada is hitting some major home runs.

The tunes. The politics. The culture.

Who wants to go?