For this story, I had the pleasure of traveling to London. Berlin and Washington to interview 6 people that represented all sides of the issue. Fifty or more countries in the world are rich in resources: gold, silver & oil but more than half of their population lives below the poverty line. This projects looks at why.

Maybe the new paradigm is someone like me traveling with 2 HDV cameras, tripods and mic stands plus my laptop. In each country, I worked with a camera person (Kimberley Williams in Washington, DC, Karveh Shirdell in London and Bjorn Forster in Berlin. We used a single light for the interviews. I edited the transcripts and pictures and cut the piece.

Of course, none of this would be possible without all the amazing photographers bravely working in these countries.

Thanks to all for teaching me so much.

I had the pleasure of leading nine very eager photographers, young and old, through some “assignments” near Santa Fe, New Mexico as part of a National Geographic Expeditions Photography Workshop .

Enjoy this short excerpt from the final slide show with photographs the students made at Eve’s Movie Ranch. It’s the first student slide show I’ve assembled on deadline using Final Cut Pro.

I lit and shot the interviews and also shot video and stills in the field but the most fun was shooting and editing the small piece in the middle the this great story where Mary O’Connor and her team try to serve 10,000 cups of hot coffee to every one of the partners in the audience at the same time. Phew, what a race that was.

I had spent a year in New Orleans (pre Katrina) working on a story for National Geographic Magazine so I was thrilled to go back with my MediaStorm colleagues in 2008 to shoot, interview and record this multimedia piece for Starbucks.

We do a lot of very serious stories at work so it was fun to find something lighter during the first MediaStorm workshop in NYC. Fellow MediaStorm producers Eric Maierson, Chad Stevens and I wore many hats, mostly teaching and producing but also helping out recording, shooting and editing. Check out the results.

This is the project I produced in the workshop.

And if you still have the stomach for it, you can peek backstage at the Workshop in this piece by boy wonder and MediaStorm’s first intern Tim McLaughlin.

I spent two weeks in November 2007 in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico teaching a pair of workshops for National Geographic Expeditions. I was blessed with two amazing groups of students, as well as two great co-teachers: Raul Touzon and Sarah Meghan Lee. The first week I filled in for National Geographic staff photographer Nick Nichols and the second week, I taught my scheduled and advertised workshop.

Both groups of students worked extremely hard and we were all thrilled with the work produced both weeks. Here’s the final slide show from the second week, the one where I was the advertised “prize-pig”, err, I mean the “lead teacher”. I recorded the ambient sounds and mixed the soundtrack.

The Tuscany Photo Workshops 2007

I’ve had a great summer in 2007 travelling and teaching. I wanted to share a bit of what the workshop experience is like for me. This workshop, The Spirit of People, was held at the Tuscany Photo Workshops in August 2007. To me, this is what it feels like to be in a weklong photo workshop.

The SantaFe Photo Workshops 2007

I spent a week at the SantaFe (New Mexico) Photo Workshops, teaching a new class: Visual Storytelling with Audio.

The nine students ranged from professional photographers to fine artists to teachers to advanced amateurs. It was a great group and they worked long hours using the Zoom H4 recorder and AudioTechnica mics, Audacity, IView Media Pro and Soundslides Plus in addition to their digital still cameras.

In a single day, each student recorded, photographed, edited, mixed and output a multimedia show. On the second day they found a new story and recorded, photographed, edited, mixed and output a new multimedia show. Then on the third day created another new multimedia piece from scratch. Their heads must have been spinning but each piece got better and better.

While you can see the entire show below –and everyone did extremely well– here these are two of my favorite Visual Storytelling with Audio pieces:

Rick Scibelli: Final Spring

Julie Skarratt: In This Moment

Visual Storytelling with Audio 2007 class

This is the final show with everyone’s work from the class, including Julie and Rick’s piece. It’s 14.53 long.

Please remember that before this class, no one had ever recorded much audio or produced a multimedia show by themselves. I think they did a fantastic job.

(Thanks to Joe Weiss for letting us use SoundSlides Plus, his new supercharged –and very cool– version of the classic media production tool that makes slide shows simple and now creates work that looks more and more like you’ve slaved away in Final Cut Pro )

Both groups of students worked extremely hard and we were all thrilled with the work produced both weeks. Here’s the final slide show from the second week, the one where I was the advertised “prize-pig”, err, I mean the “lead teacher”. I also recorded the ambient sounds at the beginning and end of the show and mixed the soundtrack.