Looking Back at 2010

It has been quite a year 2010. There were plenty of stories that have touched us all in different ways, images that we'll never forget, and likely personal moments that test or reward us.

I cherish my time with  my family, especially around Christmas. It's a time to reconnect, especially with my two teenagers, and recharge the batteries so to speak for the challenges that the New Year will bring.

As far as work is concerned it has been relatively busy, at least for a daily newspaper photographer working in Canada. Below is a collection of twelve images - one, unpublished photograph from each month of the year - a year that had me on the road for about 60 days working on the Haitian earthquake, the Olympics, the Dementia Series, and one other that will be published in February.

There are also more images posted on my website as a 2010 Year in Review slideshow.

A young girl heads home from her father's funeral in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Winter Solstice Parade

When you work in a place for a long period of time - twenty-one years in Toronto for me for example - you find that sometimes event assignments can get repetitive year after year. However, I've found that this happens less frequently that I've expected, and once in awhile something comes along that, surprisingly, I've never photographed before. Last night was one example of this.

The Effectiveness of the Audio Slideshow

My personal preference has always been audio slideshows when given the choice of using video or stills with audio to produce a multimedia story.

This has become painfully evident to me as I chunk away at a large project involving more video than I'm comfortable with.

If you agree or disagree, or find yourself wanting some words to make an argument for one or the other, this post on Duckrabbit may help.

TWITTER!

I can't believe what I've done. Until now, the limit of my social networking has been my website (www.peterpower.ca) and this rarely-ever-read blog of mine.

While everyone I know it seems has been using Facebook for years, I have resisted, and frankly prefer to keep a wee bit of my personal life.....well, personal.

Meeting the "DOCTOR"

Last night I had the pleasure of attending a LowePro sponsored event in Toronto where the guest speaker was Dr. Ted Grant, who is widely know as The Father of Canadian Photojournalism.

Multimedia Links Updated

globeandmail.com has been going through some changes of late following the redesign of the newspaper.

Many of the links to our multimedia pieces have disappeared over time, but they are starting to show up again in the archives of our multimedia pages.

Here is a direct link to this archive for anyone interested in looking at some of my past multimedia work, or the other excellent work done by Globe and Mail staffers.

The photography section for Globe readers is called The Camera Club - not a name we're thrilled with, but there it is. 

The Dementia Project

I've recently completed work on a three-month long project for The Globe and Mail called Dementia - Confronting the Crisis. The series began on the front of a Saturday paper on September 18th, with the full first ten pages of the Focus section devoted to it. Images and stories also ran every day the week following the launch of the series.

In addition to the still images, a selection of which I've place on my personal website, I produced four audio slideshows using Final Cut Pro.

Haiti - No Words Can Describe It

The day after the earthquake I received permission to prepare for and head south to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. This would prove to be one of the most difficult assignments I have ever had to date on two levels.

The level of the destruction, death, and suffering by Haitians and Internationals living or working there is for me, indescribable. My efforts to tell the stories of these people, and of the cities in southern Haiti seemed to fall short on all of the ten days I spent on the ground there. Images were not hard to come by of pain, suffering, death, destruction, looting, violence - of people trying to survive and people trying to deal with death all around them. Images were everywhere, but the task was, in many ways impossible. Although I tried to touch on many different aspects of this story, I feel that it is incredibly difficult to fully give a reader a sense of the scale of this story.  It is impossible to share fully the stench of death and rot on the streets, the palpable fear of men, women and children who are sleeping in the streets and will be for a very long time. Impossible to show the unimaginable amount of destroyed buildings that will have to be razed, and built up again one day.