I have  a few random photo projects coming up, which is always fun. Next weekend, I am heading down to DC for Powershift, with a few of the more environmentally minded at Tufts. The Tufts Institute for the Environment, made me the official photographer so there we go, I guess I am the photographer. I like these sorts of little assignments, when they have some sort of theme that I am really interested in. I will also be on the documentary team for the Tufts-BAC Solar Decathlon project, as they construct and deconstruct a house around Tufts and then rebuild it and show it off on the National Mall. This is a big budget project so they want to get as much press as possible and I like doing it because I get to practice some photojournalism skills, like set-up portraits and could be a nice thing to add onto the resume for future projects. It will involve taking some pictures every Saturday until the end of the year and then into the summer, until I head off wherever I head off, and then again in the fall as they ship off to DC. I’ll only get to go to DC for a few days, but still that part will be amazing, because it is supposedly like Woodstock meets geeky environmentalists and engineers…

In other news, International Bridges to Justice is going to pencil me in for working in Burundi, after I received some very scary e-mails from a few photographers that I could find who had recently worked in Zimbabwe. All of these photographers said essentially that I really shouldn’t go now, maybe next year, maybe if Mugabe dies and the military disappears… sad. The environment is just very hostile to journalists and I would be working without large media support and living in the same place for two months, which could lead to targeted crime against me. So I think for once, I will put aside my hubris and listen to the experts(and my mother…). So far Burundi is looking almost ten fold safer than Zimbabwe would have been for me. I’m sorry for the two people who donated to my fundable, but didn’t get to be charged because I stopped it! I will start fundraising again as soon as I can make concrete plans for the trip. I also will need to write an essay for the Tufts Institute for Global Leadership to possibly get grant funding. My dream way to do this summer is to leave for Burundi a week or so after the seniors graduate in May, work for International Bridges to Justice for six weeks, then spend two more weeks in Burundi pursuing a private photojournalism project, using contacts made in the first couple of weeks. This story would probably be about a larger environmental problem and its far reaching toll on a variety of different characters. Large scale soil erosion is one possible issue to look into. Then I would spend two weeks after I get back editing and producing essays for all the different outlets I can plug. I will do a very broad sweep of media networks, both online and print, before I go, gauging possible interest in a series or essay from Burundi on human rights or the environment.

Random pictures around campus…