Saturday, December 29, 2012

Over the cliff?

These Capitol Hill cliff-hangers can fascinate, or anger, the nation, but they also often make for some fun photography. There's something pleasant about spending a weekend or end-of-year holiday on the Hill as the drama unfolds.

According to today's stories House Speaker John Boehner, seen above headed to the White House, has given up on his divided House and handed the initiative to the Senate. Meanwhile protester Rives Grogan provided an exciting interlude when he began screaming anti-abortion slogans from the Senate visitors' gallery (and this gentleman has the voice to do it). Mr. Grogan's made something of a career of this, disrupting the Senate previously in June and interrupting a pro ballgame in October by running on the field with a sign endorsing Mitt Romney.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

NRA Press Conference

This was part of the scene yesterday as the NRA and its executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, held a press conference one week after the mass slayings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Mr. LaPierre's recommendations - more armed people at schools. "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

What a relief!!


Monday, December 17, 2012

Remembering Newtown, Conn.

On Capitol Hill today, two days after the Newtown elementary school shootings.

Monday, December 10, 2012

Doc in a Day

Imagine spending a weekend working in intense collaboration with three people you've never met -- including eight straight hours closeted together in a tiny white editing room.

That's what it was like this past weekend for those of us fortunate to be included in Stone Soup Film's "Doc in a Day" project. Stone Soup, a nonprofit that makes films for other nonprofits, fielded five teams of four people each to produce five quick documentaries around D.C. this weekend.

Our team, Team Five (definitely the best one, incidentally), got lucky with our assignment:  BloomBars, a wonderful performance/exhibition/anything space run by John Chambers in Columbia Heights. With what I have to admit was minimal advance coordination, we first met outside BloomBars on 11th Street around 9:15. By 10 am we were shooting. And when we left the tiny Stone Soup edit suite around 8:30 Sunday night, we'd built a complex project that told BloomBar's story with action, interviews, multiple cameras, graphics, cute babies, time-lapse, and a jammin' soundtrack that sampled live audio by Baba Ras D, an artist in residence.

It was another proof that the larger concept of "stone soup," of a community coming together to build something from nothing, works. And a reminder that collaboration with good people can be really, really, fun.  Kelsey, Faith, Zev and I can't wait to show off our work, to see the other teams' films -- and to work together again.