A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a group of guys playing cricket at Walnut Hill Park. I took a few pictures, and they told me that they'd be playing a team from Montreal the second weekend of October. So today I had my afternoon free, so I went over to the park to hang out and make some pictures.

They play the group from Montreal every year. In the fall, the Montreal guys come to Connecticut, and in May, the Connecticut team heads to Montreal. It was a fun, relaxed time, and everyone involved was very friendly.

Sunday was spent covering both the Mum Parade in Bristol and the Apple Harvest Festival in Southington.
Miss Mum 2008 Juli Bradley was excited to see her friends and teammates on the Bristol Eastern High School cheerleading team, who were marching in the parade with the school's band, along the parade route.

5-year-old Joell Gouthro was nice enough to share his cotton candy with his friends, Jacob Martin, 9, left, and Dominic Martin, 6, near the end of the parade route.

I found a group of kids playing a game of wallball on the side of a building near the end of the parade route. I haven't seen a game of wallball in years, so I had to stop for a few minutes to shoot. The ball came flying toward me, and then Wilfred Beland, 11, and Zachary Adkins, 7, scrambled to grab it.

Then it was off to Southington for the Apple Harvest Festival, which included face painting.
And head painting, in the case of John Vey, who serves on the festival's committee.
And 3-year-old Tyler McVicker played with the bubbles from a vendor's bubble gun.

All in all, it was a good day of making pictures. I made sure to buy a bag of apple cider donuts and a cup of fresh cider before I left.

I shot a local charity's annual banquet at a golf course restaurant a couple days ago. While everyone was eating dinner, I walked out to the course to try to make a decent feature to pass the time. I saw these guys getting ready to tee off, so I hung around and made this image of them walking down the fairway.

The guy on the left, Ron Sutton, is assistant coach of the New Britain High School golf team, and at right is Brian Coscina, who plays for NBHS. They were out on the course that day so Brian could improve his swing before the season this Spring.

I've been shooting a summer 5v5 basketball tournament at Washington Park for the past few weeks. I shot a few games when I had nothing else on the schedule at work. It was just something I found on my own and wanted to shoot for fun. Without the pressure of getting stuff for the paper, I was able to have some fun with it and shoot basketball the way I see it, rather than some of the standard tight action shots. We ended up running some of the images as stand-alones.

I'm a sucker for backlit images.


Because I wasn't shooting for the paper, I decided to take some risks and do something interesting, like putting the only wide angle lens I had with me onto a remote camera. There wasn't a ladder for me to use to put it behind the glass, so I ended up standing on a chair and putting it on the post. I wasn't tall enough to even see through the viewfinder, so I had to guess on the focus point by looking at the focus distance window on the lens and shooting at f/8 for a little wiggle room on the depth-of-field. The background is a bit cluttered for my tastes, but I think it may provide a sense of place.

This is the same dunk, as seen from my hand-held camera with the 80-200 on it.


Nice light, clean background and good action that is, unfortunately, heading away from me.

I had fun shooting this tournament. The organizers told me their purpose was providing a positive influence for the guys and to help keep them out of trouble during the summer. Many people from the community came out and watched the games.

On Wednesday, Aug. 6, I photographed Vivian Nowakowski. Vivian's husband, Andrzej, lost his wallet and had to reapply for his green card. (They both immigrated from Poland as children.) Andrzej has a criminal record, so he was denied. He now sits in the Wyatt Detention Center in Rhode Island awaiting possible deportation. Vivian is representing him on his appeal.

Vivian has been on dialysis since '95, and she received a letter from the Yale-New Haven Transplantation Center that she may be ineligible for a kidney transplant without her husband there to care for her during recovery.

Vivian is also caring for her aging parents. Her son, a Marine, expects to deploy in spring '09.

"It's just overwhelming. Totally overwhelming," she explained, as she held back tears.

"I said to myself that I'm not going to give up on my husband."

The story can be read here: Part 1 and Part 2.

I was able to spend some time on Friday with a 4-year-old named CJ, who has a rare disease called Urea Cycle Disorder. His body isn't able to digest protein properly, so it turns to ammonia in his body. He's only allowed 7 grams of protein per day, so they have him eating special low protein foods and carefully reading the labels of anything he eats.

During the interview, he crawled onto his mom's lap for a bit, and I snapped off a couple frames before he went off to play again.



I thought this picture was nice because it shows that he's just a regular kid. His shoe is coming untied, but he doesn't care, because the spring-loaded door over that electrical outlet is really neat. I asked him what he likes to do for fun, and he said, "dig holes."

Yesterday, I went with David and his two employees, Frank and Ron, to document them treating some hives for Varroa mites. The light in the second yard was perfect for the first 10 minutes that we were there. The bees were in a small clearing in the woods along a busy road. The sun for those 10 minutes was perfectly between two groups of trees. The light, filtered through the tree canopy, fell perfectly onto a few of the pallets of hives.

I spent the whole ten minutes chasing the gorgeous light and hoping David would step into the spots of light. For a minute or two, the entire yard was filled with the lingering smoke from their smokers. Normally the smoke blows away a few seconds after the hives are smoked, but the trees blocked the breeze.

Above is Ron, one of the employees, opening a hive. The story is about David, but as I was crouched there, waiting for David to come over and start working with these hives, Ron came over and started doing them.


Florida at 7 p.m. is perfect.

For the past few months, I've been doing a long-term personal project on a beekeeper. I plan to use this blog as an outlet to post these images. I have a more traditional picture story edit on my Web site (ryanpelham.com), but I hope to use this to display the images that don't make my edit. Hopefully I'll be updating this more often than my Web site, and providing a more in-depth look in the life of David Webb.

Webb is a commercial beekeeper with roughly 700 hives of bees. He's working on increasing his hive count to over 1,000. His honey house is located on State Road 520 in Cocoa, just past Bithlo heading east.



This is favorite image from the project thus far. In this image, Dave is taking a sample of bees to test for Varroa mites, one of the many things that are hurting the bee population in the United States.


On June 26, it began storming while I was driving to the honey house. The power tends to go out at the shop when it storms, so I thought I might make some pictures of him walking through the dark with a flashlight. The power didn't go out this day.

While we were standing in the area of the honey house used to fill and store 55-gallon drums of honey, Dave wandered off. About a minute after he left, I went off to find where he had gone. I walked into the garage area where he builds frames. He had gone in there to grab something, but when I went in there, he was paused in front of the screen door staring out at the rain. I raised my camera and made one frame, and then he turned around and walked away. I thought it was a nice moment.


On Wednesday, July 2, I went out to the honey house to see what was happening there. Dave wasn't there, but Frank, who works for him, was there building frames. I hung out with Frank for a bit until Dave returned. He ended up mowing the grass.

I wanted to take pictures of him mowing the grass, because I feel like I should document his entire life. Being a beekeeper isn't just about working with bees. He has to run a business and keep the honey house clean and maintained. Some people may think this image doesn't belong in a story about a beekeeper, but I feel like I need to photograph this aspect of his life.

I wanted to give the mowing pictures a sense of place. I didn't just want a picture of a guy on a mower. I wanted a picture of a guy on a mower at a honey house on the edge of a ranch.

They were also building frames and supers (the boxes that bees make honey in) on Wednesday. The above image is Dave putting pre-cut supers into the shed. There was a nice little shaft of light entering the otherwise dark shed, but unfortunately it never quite lined up on his face the way I wanted it to.