I really enjoyed listening to and learning from Newsday photographer John Williams. I wasn’t expecting to take too many notes on his talk, but he gave a lot of useful information that I plan to use in my photography. I ended up using an entire page (front and back) for notes. I love how photography interacts with journalism and I became even more interested in it in the past year. It is so mesmerizing how some news photographers can capture so much emotion and, a lot of times, it isn’t staged or planned. My favorite photojournalist at the moment is Pulitzer Prize winner Julio Cortez.
Today I also got to speak with two other really interesting people.
Dr. Sharon Nachman is a pediatric and infectious disease expert at Stony Brook. She provided a lot of insight into COVID-19 and how the virus can spread (or be prevented from spreading). She also told us that the Delta variant of COVID-19 virus is about sixty times more infectious than the alpha strand that has been going around, which is really strange to think about because I had already thought of COVID-19 as this really easily spreadable virus and now its even easier to spread.
Kara Hahn is a Suffolk County legislator who is planning on running for Congress in New York’s first Congressional district (which is my district!). As someone who loves politics, I found this press interview really intriguing. It’s really cool to think of how much an impact one person can have on a whole county. I had known that all police officers in Suffolk carried Narcan for a while, but I didn’t know that it was only since 2012 and because of Kara Hahn’s efforts.