Helen & Joel’s engagement pictures in DC
Helen and Joel really couldn’t have picked a more stunning fall day than today for their engagement pictures. What a fun and beautiful afternoon we had walking around Meridian Hill Park, the National Mall and the Tidal Basin for pictures. Oh, how I love living in DC with all its wonderful places to photograph.
Tim and Kaoru’s wedding at the Carnegie Institution
For once I was a guest at a wedding and not the official wedding photographer. Of course, I couldn’t help but take some pictures. I used both my professional camera and my iPhone. Here’s to Tim and Kaoru!
DC’s little earthquake
Thankfully, only church spires, frames on walls and books on shelves appear to be casualties of today’s 5.8 magnitude earthquake. I’ve got two out of three.
I Street Bike Social makes DC that much more fun
When I ride my bike around DC alone, no one claps for me. No one cheers. No one dances. Because that would be weird, right?
Well, things are a little different when you’re one of about two dozen riders in the I Street Bike Social. People on the sidewalk clap. And they cheer. And yes, they dance. Certainly, it helps that the ride leader has a stereo system hooked up to his bike. It’s surreal to be pedaling down K Street at night, all lit up by semi-empty lobbying offices, while “Stayin’ Alive” booms from in front of you and cyclists surround you.
It’s also so freakin’ cool. I think we must’ve looked like a small parade that lost its way.
Most people seemed to be new to tonight’s bike social. There were several riders like myself who came alone. There were also some random bicyclists we picked up along the way, which added an air of whimsy to the ride. See in the picture above the two guys riding away from the rest of us? They were heading somewhere else and decided to join the fun. Cheers all around, as I recall.
Jordan, our ride leader, started this bike social for his employer BicycleSPACE after seeing a similar bike ride in Boulder, Colo. Here in DC, we started out at the BicycleSPACE office at 4th and Eye St. NW at 8 p.m. – close to sunset – and then wound our way through H Street, Capitol Hill, the National Mall, Foggy Bottom and Georgetown. A light breeze blew and the temperature was just right as we coasted around. DC is beautiful at night. We had some mishaps with the contraption carrying the stereo but Jordan played some good tunes: Adele, Rhianna, Outkast. I tried boogeying on my bike but that’s actually kind of hard if you don’t want to crash. Which made me realize I had never listened to music while riding my bike.
As I mentioned before, other people seemed surprised and really pleased to see us. We weren’t doing anything special, but somehow, being part of the group made us all look special. By the time we took a break by the Potomac River, the sky was dark and I gratefully drank from my water bottle. After about 20 minutes, we headed up K Street. I broke off at 11th St. to go home. Two hours of leisurely biking was enough for me.
For all the fun I had, I think the name “bike social” is a bit of a misnomer. It’s not like all us bicyclists were talking and laughing and socializing all the time. I did chat with a cool woman who just moved here from Wisconsin three weeks ago. I also talked with a nice gal wearing a bike helmet that looked like a houndstooth ball cap. But for the most part, those conversations and the whole night gave me more of a sense of community. People seemed to simply enjoy being a part of this small band of bikers, taking over one or two street lanes at a time – even in Georgetown. Which is kind of crazy if you’ve ever been in Georgetown.
Can’t wait for next week!
Andrea & Cristina get married in Washington DC
Andrea (left) and Cristina (right) sign their marriage certificate.
When you see Andrea and Cristina together, you wonder how the right to marry could be denied to two people who love each other and are so entirely committed to each other. Andrea and Cristina live in Maryland. Same sex marriage isn’t legal there. But earlier this year, it looked like it might become legal. On the day the Maryland House of Delegates was voting on a same sex marriage proposal, Andrea and Cristina visited a potential wedding site in Maryland. The went in giddy that marriage would soon be legal for them. They left the site disappointed that the same sex marriage proposal had been left to die.
This incredibly upbeat and funny couple regrouped and decided they would marry in Washington, D.C. Same sex marriage became legal here last year. But where to hold the ceremony? Andrea and Cristina’s friend Gillian lives in a beautiful home in Washington, D.C., so they asked if they could hold their wedding there. Gillian (who’s also my friend) was incredibly touched by their request. Of course she said, “Yes!” And that’s how I came to find myself at Gillian’s last night, photographing one of the most emotional weddings I’ve ever attended. Everyone cried. And I do mean everyone. Including me.
Congratulations, Andrea and Cristina!
Cherry Blossom Parade
Above: The most beautiful but least interesting floats in the parade.
Below: Crowds, crowds and more crowds! Lots of kids were equally scared and excited by the revelry. I love DC.
Thinking Day | A cross-cultural food experience
One of my best memories of being a Girl Scout in Jeddah was celebrating Thinking Day. This was when Girl Scouts and Girl Guides from other countries living in the city got together for one big hoe-down. Okay, not exactly a hoe-down, but one big cultural exchange.
The day began with a procession of scouts from each country carrying that country’s flag. I always wanted to carry the United States flag. I thought it would be fun to march around in my green uniform and hold the flag straight up. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t drop it. I never got to find out. Instead, I sat on my school gym floor with hundreds of other scouts as groups of girls glided by with flags, including those of India, the United Kingdom, France, Pakistan, the United States and Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Girl Scouts fascinated me the most as they appeared to have run to the fabric store and wrapped themselves in bolts of gray cloth from head to toe. Well, except their faces, thank goodness.
What does any of this have to do with these photographs here, apparently taken in the present time, at my present home, without anyone wearing a Girl Scout uniform? (Though that would be kind of cool.) Well, Thinking Day also involved food. And the other night, as Dulce (from Mexico), Ting-Ya (from Taiwan) and I (half from South Korea), cooked foods from our countries, I remembered Thinking Day. How lucky am I that more than 20 years later, I keep having interesting cross-cultural experiences with my friends?
Ting-Ya showed us the massive amounts of preparation that go into creating a Taiwanese dish. I showed them how to make kimbap. Pictured above is the very first one I’ve ever made without my Mom’s assistance. And Dulce made an American salad with ingredients all the colors of Mexico’s flag. Now I’m thinking of throwing a Thinking Day-type dinner party, where everyone brings a dish from a different country. Yum!
Home in Washington DC
After all the traveling I’ve done for work in the past three months (also, here and here), it’s nice to be home for a while, snow and all.
Night walk down Massachusetts Avenue
10th Street.
One night in mid-November I decided to walk from Union Station to Dupont Circle via Massachusetts Avenue. It’s about two-and-a-half miles, and I usually walk portions of this route during my daily daytime routine. As I walked I thought about how the two-and-a-half miles as a whole is a walk I never would have done when I lived in DC 13 years ago. Back then, Mass Ave. between Union Station and 11th Street was decrepit with little reason to stroll at night, unless you wanted to be mugged. Since then, all the downtown neighborhoods adjacent to Mass Ave. have blossomed (or fallen to gentrification, depending on your view.)
Walking along Mass Ave. last month, I was surprised by how many things I saw that I never notice during the day: a sticker on the ground, a shadow on the wall. I became especially enamored of the trees, which glowed in the street lights like sea-dwelling plants you’d never want to tangle with. (I’ve posted only one tree picture here so you don’t get bored by all the other ones.) I might make a habit of walking down all of DC’s main arteries at night and photographing what I see.
3rd Street
8th Street
5th Street
4th Street
14th Street
4th Street
Carnegie Institute wedding starring Megan + Adam
Megan and Adam are married!
These two chose the gorgeous Carnegie Institute in downtown Washington DC as their wedding venue. I’d passed the building a thousand times before, never imagining that the structure hid a huge, light-filled atrium – a lovely setting for exchanging vows and beginning married life. In the hours before the ceremony, Megan kept saying, “I can’t wait to be married to Adam! I just love him. I’m so lucky!” I love it when brides and grooms talk about each other this way. When Adam and Megan are together, she smiles and laughs even more than usual, which is saying a lot because Megan is hands-down the most laughter-filled bride I’ve ever met. Adam isn’t quite as outwardly expressive (as we all learned from Danny, the best man, during his hilarious toast speech) but you can see by the way he looks at her that he’s incredibly happy.
What a great privilege it was to photograph Megan and Adam’s wedding. I’m so happy for them!
A big thank you goes out to my colleague Amanda Lucidon, who worked with me as a second set of eyes. Scroll halfway down for some of her fantastic pictures.
Hair by Carina at Bang Salon Metropole
Photograph by Amanda Lucidon
Photograph by Amanda Lucidon
Photograph by Amanda Lucidon
Photograph by Amanda Lucidon
Photograph by Amanda Lucidon
Megan & Adam preview
Left: Before the wedding | Right: After the wedding | Both pictures: Happy as can be!
More to come….
Kayaking on the Potomac River
It was the first un-humid, un-sweltering day in weeks when P. and I decided to knock an adventure off our “Top 10 Things To Do This Summer” list: kayaking on the Potomac River. Oh, the gorgeous views we saw! Georgetown, the Lincoln Memorial and Roosevelt Island, a rainbow, ducks – I saw them all in a way I’d never seen them before. Still, I was disappointed to find trash floating all over the river. At first, it was just a bottle here and there. I actually picked up an empty Pepsi bottle, vowing to myself I would pick up any more trash we found. But then it became clear this task would be overwhelming. Ugh.
Find a penny, pick it up…..
Whenever I guest lecture about multimedia storytelling, I stress the importance of having a personal project. This is a story or an essay that you do for yourself, not for an editor or a professor or a publication. You do it because you’re passionate about the topic, the person, the issue, the situation, because not creating this story would leave you always wondering, “Why didn’t I do that? Why didn’t I make time for that?” A personal project allows you to be more creative, inventive and risky than you might be with an assignment. It can be a fun story or heavy story. Either way, you do a personal project because you must, because you love it. That’s all.
This has been my personal project for the last year-and-a-half: The Penny Project, the story of Leslie Stein, a woman who picks up all the change she finds on the street. In three years she’s collected hundreds of dollars and started a change-collecting movement among her friends and family. Last year she started donating the change to an organization striving to make positive changes in the lives of young women in DC.
I love this story. More to come.
(Mind you, this is just a first rough cut of the story introduction. I’m pretty set on opening with the sound of change, but beyond that I’m still thinking. Feel free to leave me thoughts and suggestions in the comments section.)
Happy birthday to Mom, August and Eun!
I threw my mom’s surprise birthday party at the beginning of May. Organizing this from afar was quite a task.
First, I had to lie to my Mom and tell her I couldn’t escape from DC for the weekend to celebrate a banner year birthday with her. In truth, I woke up early on a Saturday morning, drove down to Newport News and spent the morning of her party day picking up food from KFC, Domino’s and Mona Restaurant, a Korean restaurant that agreed to cater the bash even though they normally don’t serve such small parties. My sister and brother-in-law brought the cake and drinks.
Then, my Dad and I worked together to invite people to the party. Dad focused on church friends and I focused on Korean friends, many of whom don’t speak English. Ah, finally putting my hard-earned language skills to use for the first time in a while! I ended up leaving funny voicemails for almost everyone because no one picked up their phones. Luckily, enough people got the message and showed up.
Finally, I had to decide where to have the party. I haven’t lived in my hometown in a while and I’ve definitely never thrown a party there. I settled on the Virginia Living Museum, my niece’s favorite place to see her fishy friends Nemo and Dori (as well as furry and flying friend such as owls). Jennifer Turlington, the museum’s events coordinator, was wonderful in helping secure a party space and even coming up with the ruse for bringing my mom to the museum: why not have my Dad tell my Mom he was taking her to a flower show there? Not to knock my Dad too hard here, but I was suspicious my Mom would fall for this lie since flower shows aren’t exactly my Dad’s thing. Nevertheless, it worked. Jennifer posted a volunteer at the museum entrance. My Dad went up to the volunteer and said, “We’re here for the flower show,” which were the magic words for the volunteer to lead my parents through a side entrance, then down a path, then into a building, then down a hall into a classroom filled with all of us. Surprise!
The look on my Mom’s face was fantastic! She later said she wondered why she was being led to a “flower show” in a classroom in a building. She also said this was the best birthday she ever had.
August’s 8th birthday party in the beginning of June was a maelstrom of laughing, screaming, sugared-up kids exacerbated by a thunderstorm that led to much indoor horseplay and rowdiness. At the end, when everyone was gone and Eun and Marty were sweeping up and wiping down after their son’s celebration, they said, “See? No one ever tells you about THIS part of being a parent!” Haha! Those two crack me up.
Eun started out as my Asian American Journalists Association journalism mentor over 12 years ago. Over time we’ve become good friends to the point that I feel I’m a part of the Van Der Kim family: Eun, Marty, August and Reid (my godson). So I was thrilled to be at her 40th birthday party in mid July. The best part of the night? When Eun’s sisters-in-law appeared at the front door – they flew in from Arizona to surprise her!
Go, Go, Gadget!
What could be more fun than an all-afternoon trivia romp and scavenger hunt around DC’s famous and obscure sights? That’s exactly what I said to myself when I saw the ad for DC Challenge a couple months ago. So with help from friends and friends of friends, we cobbled a team together – Team Go, Go, Gadget! – and off we ran through downtown DC (with about 2,000 other trivia fiends) this past Saturday. The only rules were we had to use only our feet or public transportation and we had to take a photograph of the WHOLE team at each trivia location.
We searched for answers to clues such as: People say that the word “lobbying: comes from favor-seekers hanging out in this hotel’s lobby. It shares a name with a longtime NBC Today Show personality. Take a picture inside (if they don’t get sick of Challengers running through) or just outside.
Know the answer to that one? We didn’t. Tony and Ben researched the answer on their phones while the rest of us guessed aloud. The Couric Hotel? The Lauer Lounge? Ann Curry Motel? Thank god for iPhones and Blackberries, which gave us the answer: the Willard Hotel. And so we all ran over to the Willard Hotel, where a bemused employee to take a picture of us in the lobby. And you know what we found out? The scavenger hunt organizers didn’t tell the hotel – or anyone else/place on our clue list – that oh, 2,000 sweaty people might be dropping by on Saturday afternoon to snap a photograph.
Eleven clues, a few miles and almost three hours after we started, we crossed the finish line. It was a fantastic way to spend an afternoon!
Cooking Korean food
Last weekend my Mom came to visit and taught me how to cook 멸치 볶음 (myulchi bokkeum), which is anchovies lightly friend in sesame oil, soy sauce, sugar and a small bit of maple syrup. I’m getting more into cooking and hope my mom will teach me how to create more Korean dishes.
Digging out from the snowstorm
Washington DC is finally starting to dig out from back-to-back snowstorms – and I’m finally getting out and about again. Last night around 6:30 pm, after almost three full days cooped up inside, I just had to get out. I bundled up, called my friend Allison and told her I was walking over to her house. The first thing I saw when I walked outside was a man shoveling snow off his car by standing on his car (picture above).
Today I worked out of my office for the first time all week. I actually ran to work because 1) I figured it would be faster than the Metro, which is running trains few and far between and 2) I wanted to see what the city looks like. Washington DC looks beautiful! Like a white maze. In the afternoon I trekked to our roof to take a picture of the intersection of 16th St. and K St. (picture below). You can see the White House and the Washington Monument in the distance.
Digging out from Snowmageddon
Digging out from Snowmageddon in Lorton, Virginia. There’s more snow coming!
A snowy night in Columbia Heights, DC
A snowpocalypse is barreling toward DC for the second time this winter. Isn’t that a funny word – “snowpocalypse”? This photograph was from last week’s storm, which apparently was not a snowpocalypse. At least I didn’t hear anyone call it that. This storm will be the third snowfall this week! I’ve always lived in mild-to-hot climates so I think this will be the most snow I’ll have ever seen fall in a seven-day period. I can’t wait to make snow cream, build snowpeople, watch movies, read books and do a little work.
(Above: That's me photographing while snowshoeing through a snowstorm. Picture by