100 years of inaugurations in 2 minutes
Published on CNN.com, January 16, 2013. View on CNN.com. I pulled together this little mash-up for the 2012 presidential inauguration. We ran one version during the week before the inauguration, than added a few moments from this year’s ceremony and re-featured it. A video like this looks very simple to produce, but it was actually [...]
Hawaii: The state that doesn’t vote
Published on CNN.com, Oct 24, 2012. Read on CNN.com. This video accompanied the first installment of CNN opinion reporter John Sutter‘s new column “Change The List”. (Check out the introduction article here). From Sutter’s article “Hawaii: The state that doesn’t vote”: “This little election-minded romp through paradise was part of a new CNN effort called Change the List. [...]
Undecided: Radical for Jesus, dubious of Romney
Published on CNN.com, October 5, 2012. Read on CNN.com. And check out the whole series. This video was shot as part of a series about undecided voters during the 2012 presidential election. As everyone knows, our nation’s electoral college system of voting means that many states’ votes are counted – figuratively of course – before election day. [...]
Undecided: Searching for a ‘centered’ candidate
Published on CNN.com, October 5, 2012. Read on CNN.com. And check out the whole series. This video was shot as part of a series about undecided voters during the 2012 presidential election. As everyone knows, our nation’s electoral college system of voting means that many states’ votes are counted – figuratively of course – before election [...]
Undecided: Can this Latino voter find a home?
Published on CNN.com, October 5, 2012. Read on CNN.com. And check out the whole series. This video was shot as part of a series about undecided voters during the 2012 presidential election. As everyone knows, our nation’s electoral college system of voting means that many states’ votes are counted – figuratively of course – before election [...]
Saving Aesha
Published on CNN.com, May 20, 2012. Read on CNN.com. Reporter Jessica Ravitz had been following this story for more than a year before I was assigned to join her. I can’t post the whole text story here, but her story is definitely worth reading, and of course the video I was able to shoot would not [...]
Ring around the country: Nine days in Iceland
Another first-person travel story, with accompanying photo gallery and video, this time for CNN. Published on CNN.com, September 6, 2011. Read on CNN.com. An email went around the newsroom asking for contributions to iReport’s “Destination Adventure” series, and one of the countries they were looking to feature was Iceland, a country I had just booked [...]
Behind the scenes: Celebrity portraits at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival
The Abu Dhabi Film Festival was October 14-23. I’ve already posted about live web-casting the festival’s opening and closing ceremonies, but that’s not all we were up to that week! During the days in between, I was able to shadow photographer Fabrice Dall’Anese, the festival’s official portrait photographer, as he and his crew created images [...]
Portrait of an artist
Masood Parvez has been sketching portraits of the leaders of the UAE for many years. A large collection of his work, 85 sepia-colored pencil drawings, is now on display in an exhibition called “Faces of Leadership” at the Ministry of Culture in Abu Dhabi. In the weeks leading up to the opening of the exhibition, [...]
The art of Abu Dhabi parking
Searching for a space Another Istabsir video! During the last week of Ramadan, The National’s photo editor took a photo on his iPhone of the parking situation that was below his apartment window. Parking lots in the “tourist club” neighborhood of Abu Dhabi have always been a mess, but this particular scene was spectacularly chaotic. [...]
Gagosian’s contemporary masterpieces on display at Saadiyat
Last year, the Manarat Al Saadiyat gallery on Saadiyat Island held it’s first show with Disorientation II, an exhibition that featured the work of several Arab artists. For it’s second show, the gallery is displaying pieces from the large contemporary art collection of Larry Gagosian. This is the first time that Mr. Gagosian’s collection has [...]
Preserving the nation’s lullabies
Dr. Aisha Bilkhair works with the National Center for Documentation and Research in Abu Dhabi. One of our reporters interviewed her for an article about the importance of preserving the UAE’s oral history, particularly lullabies. We decided to do a quick video about her as well in order to use the nice recordings of lullabies [...]
An iftar for everyone
Ramadan just ended last week, and the Eid ul-Fitr holidays are now over, but we were able to slip one last Ramadan video in at the last moment! Free iftar meals have been served at the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque every Ramadan since Sheikh Zayed died in 2004. Last year, The National’s magazine, M, did an [...]
Following the water trail
Bottled water is extremely popular in the UAE. Nobody drinks the tap water, which is just desalinated water from the Arabian Gulf. Tap water will not make you sick, but many believe that it leads to some problems later on, such as kidney stones. So most of the drinking water in the country comes from [...]
Radwan al Hosani and the chocolate factory
It’s now Ramadan, so all of the reporters are working on Ramadan related stories. One of the stories that came up is about how chocolate and other sweets are one of the most popular gifts to give during Ramadan and Eid. The reporter’s story focused on an Abu Dhabi based company called Fuala. The reporter [...]
Ramadan lights up the corniche
This was a quick-hit Istabsir to use as a place holder during Ramadan. The Istabsir page has been pulled for the month and will be replaced by a cool series of Ramadan photo essays that the photographers have been working on. But in the meantime, the online version of Istabsir will be a bit stagnant, [...]
Sparky’s play zone
Sparky’s play zone: Shopping can be child’s play. Another Istabsir! This one actually ran on July 11, 2010. Indoor play zones are a big deal in the UAE. Every mall I’ve been to, including malls in small towns in the middle of what seems to be nowhere, have crowded children’s play zones. It gets so hot, [...]
The people on the bus go…
Journey to Liwa Another Istabsir! (Still working on that new website most days). For this Istabsir, we decided to take a bus as far into the desert as we could get. As a journalist here, I drive my (rental) car everywhere. It’s pretty safe to say that most western expatriates also stick to their own [...]
A hidden piece of the Emirates
Double enclave Another Istabsir video. We’ve been very busy preparing for our new website to launch, so we haven’t had the opportunity lately to do much other than work on the new site, and keep up with the weekly Istabsir. Fortunately, this one was lots of fun to shoot. Galen and I went hunting for [...]
Let the cranes begin
Ever-present but hardly noticed. Another video for the Istabsir series. (http://thenational.ae/istabsir) This time we focused on the cranes that litter the skyline of Abu Dhabi. We try not to use music for the Istabsir videos, but the video was a bit boring with nothing driving it. So the audio you hear is a bit of [...]
Women to watch
The National’s M magazine profiled 10 successful, ambitious and stereotype-breaking Arab women for an article called “Women to Watch.” I was asked to do some short videos with three of the women who agreed to be interviewed in front of the camera. Here, Elham al Qasimi, the first Arab woman to travel across the Arctic ice [...]
Riding the waves
“Riding the waves” is an installment in The National’s weekly photo essay and video series, Istabsir. For this week, we featured the jet-skis that are always riding around Abu Dhabi’s breakwater. The breakwater keeps the large waves of the gulf away from the calm shores of Abu Dhabi’s coastline, but it is also the place where [...]
From the top of Jebel Hafeet
“From the top of Jebel Hafeet: A sense of serenity” is an installment in The National’s weekly photo essay and video series, Istabsir. This week featured an evening on Jebel Hafeet, the second tallest mountain in the UAE. All of the guide books for the UAE say that you have to visit Jebel Hafeet, and [...]
Five fingers, one fist
This is an installment in The National’s weekly photo essay and video series called Istabsir. The Arabic word Istabsir roughly translates as “to attentively reflect on and contemplate with respectful consideration.” Every week, the essay focuses on one small aspect of UAE life by dropping the viewer into a new place. This week featured a [...]
