Memorial Day, Storm King Mountain
By Michael Kodas This Memorial Day, Carolyn and I climbed the Storm King 14 trail, on Storm King Mountain, overlooking Interstate 70 near Glenwood Springs, CO. The trail leads to the sites where 14 of America’s elite wildland firefighters – smokejumpers, hotshots and helitac crewmen – were overrun by an exploding wildfire on July 6, [...]
Hewlett Fire overtakes Poudre Canyon
The Hewlett Fire crests a ridgeline in Poudre Canyon, northwest of Fort Collins, CO, on Monday night. The fire broke out around 1 p.m. Monday about a mile from Poudre Park, northwest of Fort Collins. The fire burned actively through the night rather than laying down as wildfires often do. By Tuesday morning it was [...]
Bike Tube
Today, as I was walking across the University of Colorado campus with a friend who was visiting from New York for her nephew’s graduation, I came across a trio of students headed out to cool off in Boulder Creek. One of them wore a personal flotation device in case she sank her bicycle. The costumes [...]
My Documentary – The Resurrection of Christchurch – Plays Tues Night on HDnet WorldReport
By Carolyn Moreau My hometown – Christchurch, NZ – has endured more than 10,000 earthquakes since September, 2010. Earlier this year, I packed my video gear and went back to see what has become of the city I grew up in. I had to get special permission from the authorities to tour the devastated downtown [...]
I scheduled a shoot and a bear showed up.
Story and Video by Carolyn Moreau Photo by Michael Kodas Sometimes, the coolest things happen on assignment. My job this morning involved an early shoot on a student bus at the University of Colorado at Boulder. A short time after I climbed aboard, around 7 am, the driver’s radio crackled. All drivers were warned that [...]
Whole Foods Market and Sustainable Seafood
Words and Pictures by Michael Kodas Starting this week Whole Foods Market, the grocery chain, will no longer sell seafood rated red by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch and the Blue Ocean Institute. The standards take into account not only how many of each species of fish there are in the sea, but also [...]
Hoop Dreams
Watching all the pageantry surrounding the NCAA basketball tournaments during the past couple weeks reminded me of this photo I took nearly 30 years ago during a photography internship at the Kansas City Times (back when the Star was Kansas City’s afternoon daily and the Times was published from the same building as the morning [...]
B-Roll
By Carolyn Moreau I have a friend who goes crazy if I even mention the word “B-roll.” Naturally, when I saw this funny video “We got that B Roll” I sent it to him immediately and happily waited for the explosion. A filmmaker and video producer, Mike L. is a passionate believer in visual storytelling. [...]
Going Wild with Maurice Sendak
By Michael Kodas “What’s it take for a celebrity to make a successful book?” Stephen Colbert asked Maurice Sendak during his two-part interview this week with the author of Where the Wild Things Are and other beloved children’s books. “What do I have to do?” “Well, you’ve started already by being an idiot,” Sendak responded. [...]
Fotoshopped
By Michael Kodas “You don’t have to rely on a healthy body image or self respect anymore. Now that’s the power of Fotoshop.” So states filmmaker Jesse Rosten’s terrific parody of digital beauty, and the computer programming on which it relies. It’s a fabulous sendup of a topic that’s been scrutinized for years – the [...]
Diving into 2012
It’s the time of year when the clock rewinds. A fresh beginning; a new outlook. Anything is possible if you are willing to try. Here at Narrative Light, I’m packing for a month in Christchurch, New Zealand where I will produce a series of video stories on the earthquakes, which sadly have started again. Michael [...]
The Fire That Darkened the Festival of Lights
Here’s a preview of a long term multimedia project we are working on. By Michael Kodas One year ago, on the first day of Hanukkah, a teenager smoking a hookah tossed the charcoal from the pipe into an illegal garbage dump outside Isfiya, Israel. Later that morning the adjacent forests of Mount Carmel, Israel’s largest [...]
The Multimedia Schlep
By Michael Kodas It used to be so easy. You just threw a couple of cameras and lenses, a bag of film, and few notebooks into a bag and got on a plane. But the digital age’s myriad of new storytelling methods, and the increasing requirement of journalists to work and collaborate in a variety [...]
Seven Billion Zombies
We spent Halloween photographing zombies on Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall. It struck Michael as more than a coincidence that the hordes emerged on the very day the world was to welcome its seventh billion occupant. His story below: By Michael Kodas So what’s brought all these walking dead to Colorado? Last night in Durango, CO, [...]
The Image and Conservation
Michael got back from Miami a few days ago where he attended the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference. He’s thrilled to see the New York Times Green blog wrote about a panel he moderated on landscape and environmental photography. His story below: By Michael Kodas Thursday night at the Society of Environmental Journalists annual [...]
Capulin, New Mexico
I drove all day across Texas, then camped in a decrepit rest area, just over the state line into New Mexico.
