I was speechless when I heard over the phone, “You’re going to be busy for the next six months. You just won the Alexia grant.”

It took a moment to recover, to say thank you, but it’s taken a little while to realize the significance. Alexia is a well respected photojournalism foundation and they have supported some incredible work. To win one of their grants is a great honor.

That recognition is confidence-building, but it’s also four years of research, grant writing, and relationship building. It’s four years of reporting on human trafficking in southeast Asia. It’s another ten years of documenting the impacts of sexual violence on individuals and communities. And starting a non profit. It’s years of photography and developing my multimedia skills. It’s hands on experience with education, advocacy, and audience engagement.

All of this went into writing the grant application.

I recently gave a talk to local journalists at a monthly meet up. It was casual; a bunch of photographers and beers and a projector. My kind of thing. They asked me about the grant, looking for tips on how to get one. I picked apart my grant proposal, analyzed the application, and found that I had to go back to those moments over the years where I tried, failed, or succeeded, but each time I learned something. Something that applies to today.

Writing a successful grant isn’t just about the vision of what the end product will be or the budget required. It’s about knowing your subject inside and out, then crafting a strong story to carry it.

I won the grant. I’m still a little speechless. And excited about the work ahead.

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It always sounds easier than it ends up being, but working through the surprises keeps things interesting. 

My relationship with the Pomegranate Center started at a wedding last summer. Catherine and Andy’s, to be exact. Their officiant happened to be the managing director of Pomegranate; she had a big project coming up, and needed some help with it. For both Pomegranate and myself, this turned into an ongoing relationship with the Tully’s Coffee brand and it’s parent company, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. 

A couple months ago, Pomegranate asked if I could produce a video for their annual fundraiser breakfast. They didn’t need a “What is Pomegranate Center,” they wanted something with a little story about diversity, community, and leveraged the content I had shot in 2011.

Over coffee, we looked at the potential characters and found a story about parenting and exposing children to diversity and community. John, a single parent, was a volunteer at one of the Pomegranate builds last year. His two boys brought him to the event which struck a chord with the values he developed as a teen.

The work plan was simple: shoot an interview, collect some B-roll, and show off Pomegranate Center with existing visual content. I enjoy working in a team, but I’m comfortable in the field, the edit suite, or as a producer. This allows me to fit a variety projects with a scalable approach. It works well for a fundraiser short or more intense documentary pieces.

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With the release of the new Nikon D800 and the Canon 5D Mark III, both amateur and professional photographers have new tools at their disposal. Questions abound: Which camera is better? Should I upgrade? What will it let me do? Should I go pure-video like a Canon C300 or a Sony NEX-FS700?

I am appreciative of the Canon 5D Mark II; I own two, and these compact DSLR’s have allowed me to shoot more video for my clients and for my personal projects. I’m enjoying the medium and how the combination of video, audio, and stills gives me more tools for storytelling, in spite of the increased complexity and greater workload. Will I upgrade? In due time, when it makes financial sense and there’s a need. For me, my main concerns are better ergonomics, audio capture, rolling shutter and moire.

The thing is, it’s just gear, and without story you’ve got nothing.
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With the Alaskan salmon season approaching, I thought I’d share some work I produced last year for Dan Lamont, a fellow photographer and board member with the Blue Earth Alliance. He needed an extra set of hands to finish up a project with the Seafood Producers Co-Op. Multimedia is time consuming; working as a team can make all the difference.

The Co-Op was updating its website with new content Dan had shot. They wanted to tell the salmon story, and why wild-caught salmon is so special, through video. With all the assets already shot by Dan, my job was to make a short overview piece for the Co-Op, plus a subject-specific short.

The challenge for me lay in careful image and video selection. Dan had already produced a couple of other subject-specific shorts, and we didn’t want the entire package to be reusing the same visuals. He had spent several days in Alaska capturing all the footage and stills, but working alone he could only gather so much footage, and only so many stories, and stay within budget. Having shot fishing stories in Alaska myself, I know how time intensive and expensive it can be.

Working in Dan’s editing suite, I was thankful for how he’d organized his assets, provided a rough audio track, and outlined the themes. All I had to do was clean up the audio and build the visual sequence in Final Cut.

It was fun to work in a collaborative atmosphere, and to enjoy Dan’s excellent culinary skills (lunch was on him!).

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When I was in school and working as a photographer for the University of Washington Daily, the publisher (our adviser) introduced some of us to the communications department of the Everett School District.

We would shoot hand-rolled Tri-X film, process it in the Daily’s darkroom, make contact sheets on paper we bought, edit it, and submit for client review. Once the images were chosen, we’d scan the negatives and work the images in Photoshop. It was a great arrangement; given our experience we were reasonably paid, but what we learned was invaluable. It was an introduction to contracts and corporate communications, with a reliance on our growing journalistic skill.

Last year, I received an email from Karri Matau, one of the people from the Everett School District’s communications team. She now works for the Greater Everett Community Foundation. It’s a great job: give money away to partner non profits in Snohomish County, north of Seattle. (above: Inside a juvenile detention facility where the foundation supports an art program. They are my first client to use iPhone images in an annual report)

Reintroducing herself by email, she said:

“I googled you to see if you stayed in the field. I am breathless by your portfolio and work to date!!!”

“We have a story to tell and a need to help our community celebrate and rebuild hope for the future,” she continued. “Interested in helping do some photo shoots with our grantees to “capture” our story for our annual publication and for our breakfast celebration in Sept?”

“I have hired a lot of photographer for day shoots and I’m just not pleased with the lack of emotion and energy in the shots.”
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YouthCare. I remember a background interview I did with its executive director, Melinda Giovengo, in 2010, when I wanted to learn more about their work with prostituted juveniles. (below: Giovengo at YouthCare’s Orion Center)

Not one to mince words Giovengo said, and I’m paraphrasing, that in her 20 plus years in the aftercare industry, she found the busiest time for Seattle’s street kids engaging in sex work during the 1980′s was the lunch hour. That was when the Bellevue businessmen drove to the city for a quickie. Today the business isn’t much different, but its been redefined as human trafficking, opening the issue up to different resources.

Flash forward to 2011; an introduction from a mutual acquaintance put me in touch with Deborah Edison, Director of Development and Marketing. She doesn’t mince words either.

While the YouthCare’s human trafficking program is important, Edison is less interested in talking about prostituted juveniles than she is in promoting the YouthCare’s continuum of care. Since I see human trafficking as a symptom of greater issues, with homelessness and its lack of opportunity one of the root causes, I was immediately on board. Edison wanted me to help her update YouthCare’s image library, some of which was over 10 years old, so they could showcase their work in a new website.
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There are many stories of Fred Beckey, considered one of the most prolific alpinists of our time. He is constantly in motion from one climbing trip to the next, the quintessential “dirt bagger” and master of living cheaply. He is an icon in the mountaineering community.

Nearing 89 years of age, he has established first ascents across the globe and authored, among other books, the definitive climbing guide to the Cascades; three volumes essential to any Cascade climber’s library. And now, Patagonia Books published Fred Beckey’s “100 Favorite North American Climbs.”

A hybrid of coffee table and guide book, it is large format, with narrative and climbing route topographic maps. It is meant to inspire and, as I heard last night, imbue pride in climbers when they see Fred included their favorite route. I also understand it was hard getting him to whittle it down to 100 climbs!

My Fred stories are limited. I’ve gotten lost by misreading his sometimes vague route descriptions (like “trend up and right past the white block to the second corner and onto the ridge”). While working outdoor retail, I’ve accepted his well-worn down sleeping bag for washing. I’ve successfully avoided his propositions for climbing and ski trips, I think more out of fear than anything else, as I understand they are enriching experiences in and of themselves. But with no shortage of Beckey Tales, I’ve been able to appreciate his endeavors from the safety of the published word and the stories I’ve heard from many others.

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With an eye toward prison reform, writer and academic Pete Brook analyzes prison photography from behind his desk. After three years, he decided it was time to get out, on the road, and meet the people he’d written about. Especially the prisoners.

Pete is clear that he isn’t a photographer. Instead, he writes for Wired.com’s RAW File and runs his own blog where he dissects photography about the prison system in America. I knew him peripherally through the photo community and through introduction several years ago by a mutual friend. I like what he does, so when he put out an ask to help make a Kickstarter video, I offered to shoot it and Seattle Times staffer Erica Schultz edited it with Pete in an 11 hour binge.

Prison Photography has built a community over the years. There’s no money involved, so for Pete to get on the road, he had to ask for help. The Kickstarter campaign began. By using social media and crowd-sourced funding, he successfully raised more than he thought it would cost to make the grand American tour, meeting photographers in person, visiting prisons, and seeing education programs at work.

Click here or below to read more and see a scene cut from the video.

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Just a short note from a lengthy backlog of blog posts:

As the first snows of the season descend upon the Cascades, I’m toning images from this summer’s photo shoot for Helly Hansen’s Spring 2012 Alpine Clothing Line. I had a great crew from Mountain Madness to work with, stunning weather, and one of my favorite locations: the Liberty Bell group at Washington Pass.

In my summer-reverie, I had to share an outtake the client didn’t choose.

If you’ve been to the Liberty Bell group, see if you can name this line!

Now…on to ski season, please.

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My Kivalina work was recently included in a grant to the Open Society Institute by film maker Jenni Monet as part of her distribution plan. Subsequently, the photo agency Worldwide Image Navigation (WIN-Initiative), which holds an “image collection from the independent minds and unique creative perspectives of gifted photographers worldwide,” featured my work with a joint interview in their WINk Magazine, an online publication with a very attractive presentation. Click through to Page 75 to read the article.

The slow creep of things like climate change means stories created a few years ago are still extremely relevant. In 2008 I went to the remote Alaskan village of Kivalina on assignment for Germany’s Spiegel Magazine. My five days in Alaska was an amazing experience; having grown up in the northwest and having a librarian for a mother, I was exposed to many stories about native cultures. Reading about whale hunting is one thing, actually going out on the sea ice for a whale hunt is something I’d never imagined actually doing.

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