Port-au-Prince clinic video by Pete Cihelka
My coworker Pete Cihelka produced a video from his recent trip to Haiti, covering the relief efforts in Port-au-Prince by members of Grace Church of Fredericksburg. If you are in town, check out Sunday’s Free Lance-Star or fredericksburg.com for reporter Amy Umble’s story and more of Pete’s work.
Fxbg fireworks time-lapse
Fireworks explode over Fredericksburg, Va on Saturday, July 4, 2009. (Mike Morones/The Free Lance-Star)
Director of Photography Dave Ellis and I climbed up the scaffolding around St. George’s Episcopal church in Fredericksburg the other night to photograph the fireworks with the city in the foreground. The plan was to take several cameras up, each with a different lens, and trigger the cameras at intervals and then put all the pictures together into a time-lapse video. We got up there insanely early and began setting up the cameras. In the end, we had two mounted and firing intervals and each of us had a camera that we would trigger on our own. As it happened, Dave’s camera was in a less than ideal position as we miscalculated the position of the show in relation to the foreground. My frames were OK but with only one perspective, it is kind of a boring video. I wouldn’t say the thing is a total failure but it didn ‘t rise to the levels I had hoped. On the upside, from our vantage point we spotted a few locations around downtown that might serve as better positions to photograph from next year. Click on the image above to see the show.
shameless self-promotion
Contest season is over and not surprisingly I got shut out of the major ones – NPPA, World Press & Pictures of the Year. That’s OK there was a lot of big news this year and some really powerful work entered and my stuff didn’t come close.
On the upside, the judges of the Virginia News Photographers Association’s annual contest apparently saw fit to recognize a fair number of my pictures this year. Even more surprising was that I won a regional Edward R. Murrow award for News Documentary from the Radio Television News Directors Association for a radio piece I produced for the paper’s sister station WFLS about a local National Guard unit in Kuwait. Yes, you read that right – radio. I knew my telecommunications degree was not in vain and I was pleased to tell my long-suffering parents that their tuition money finally paid off, ten years down the line. Holy $#!* – ten years since I (barely) graduated?!?!! that’s a completely different story… Anyway, the piece is now in the running for a national Murrow award but I’m not holding my breath… Check out VNPA.org to see all the winners. Also, here are a couple of my photos that won in VNPA:
Sports Feature - First Place Colonial Forge's Joe Pantaleo jumps into the arms of coach Bill Swink following his victory over Fauquier's David Yost in the championship round of the 2008 Virginia Group AAA wrestling tournament at Oscar Smith High School in Chesapeake, VA on February 23, 2008. (Mike Morones/The Free Lance-Star)
Portrait - First Place Buddy Hayes of Chesapeake, VA , Miss Wheelchair Virginia, waits to give a presenation to the Lions Club with her service dog Ellie at Falls Run Community Center on February 27, 2008. (Mike Morones/The Free Lance-Star)
Tax Day Tea Party in Fredericksburg
Don Giles of Fredericksburg carries a sign during a Tax Day Tea Party at which people protested what they see as excessive taxation and government spending outside the Fredericksburg Post Office on April 15, 2009. (Mike Morones/The Free Lance-Star)
I was assigned to cover a tax day tea party in the Burg yesterday. At first I wanted to do portraits of some of the people and record some audio of them explaining why they showed up. When I arrived, I found a lot more people than originally expected. They were packed into a fairly small area so I bagged my original idea and just tried to get the flavor of the scene. Sadly there were no counter-protesters so it was difficult to find much more than sign pictures. Anyway, here’s a little slideshow I put together in Final Cut Pro, which I am quickly warming up to. Now I just need to improve my video skills…
Anyway, I’ve been quiet lately and need to post a backlog of pictures and news so look for that soon.
