Vellum’s co-founder and Director Jim Winn recently returned from a trip to New York City, where he spent several days meeting with several of Vellum’s editorial clients. While it was more of a business trip than a shooting trip this time around, Jim shot a lot of images with his iPhone we thought we’d share a couple.

The second image is looking into the World Trade Center site, where teams from DCM Erectors, Catalyst Contractors Inc., Federated Equipment Equipment and many others have been working furiously to bring the buildings’ framework out of the ground and into the sky.

Vellum founders Jim Winn and Nathan Weber have had the pleasure of being on the workshop staff of the University of Kentucky’s Picture Kentucky Photojournalism workshop over the past three years, and are back in Kentucky this week to assist the workshop staff. This year’s workshop brought 17 photojournalism students to Hindman, Ky., to learn how to tell compelling stories through the use of still photography, video and audio.

Prior to arriving for the workshop, Vellum spent a day with Anaconda Drilling, producing images for the company. We will have some behind the scenes photos from the Picture Kentucky workshop online over the next few days, along with some select images from the Anaconda shoot.

About the workshop:The goal of the Picture Kentucky Workshop Series is to teach students how to tell compelling stories through photographs. In addition to shooting picture stories, students will work toward producing a book, multimedia and a web presentation that will be shared with the university, the host communities and the general public. During that process it is the hope of the workshop’s organizers and financial supporters that the students will share in an intense, fulfilling experience that they will carry with them for a lifetime.

The Picture Kentucky Workshop Series currently consists of a fall, winter and spring workshops that document small towns through out the state of Kentucky.

Vellum’s Co-Founder Jim Winn recently returned from a presentation in Whitesburg, Ky., with the Appalachian Cultural Project, a long term documentary project run through Western Kentucky University. As a graduate from WKU’s photojournalism program, Jim was a participating photographer with the project in 2004, and documented the lives of coal truck drivers from the Virgie, Ky., area.

The Appalachian Cultural Project is designed to promote the education of Western Kentucky University photojournalism students while respectfully documenting the people and the culture of the Appalachian region. It is the goal of the project creator and the participants to truthfully represent the people of the area and, through audio and multimedia production, to counter negative stereotypes that are unfairly attached to the region. The challenge of overcoming these stereotypes is large, but by making honest images and by treating people with respect, the project aims to reveal the realities of life in the region and celebrate Appalachian culture.

During the presentation Jim showed a mixture of photojournalism produced for editorial clients, and spoke about Vellum’s role in the industrial community. As a former newspaper photojournalist, Jim also spoke with the students about the importance of building an understanding of business and marketing, both of which will become increasingly important as newspapers go through a series of transitions in upcoming years.

While not directly related to industrial photography, we look forward to having the opportunity to produce similar images for our industrial photography clients.

Though we were busy running the workshop for the week, Nathan and I managed to find time to shoot some on our own, and the two pictures below are a snippet of some of that work.  The week in Hazard was a preview for January, when we will be back on our own to do some extended work in a series of strip mining operations in the eastern end of the state for Vellum.

These four photographs are actually one single image that was made by scanning single length of medium format film shot by Nathan Weber while working on a personal project in the summer of 2007. Nathan was collaborating with a group of photojournalists to produce a web based documentary project about the Mississippi Delta and was stationed in the town of Clarksdale. During the project Nathan had the opportunity to spend an afternoon with a train engineer at a rail yard outside of the Clarksdale area and produced a package of images focused on the day-to-day operation of the yard.