AGU Fall Meeting Press Conference

I'll be leaving my work home at AGU soon. Over the past four years, I've been collecting photos of journalists and scientists interacting to use with our Sharing Science materials. My goal has been to show action and for each photo to tell a (short) story. Here are some photos I took at the 2012 AGU Fall Meeting during one of our largest ever press conferences. In these photos, scientists present early results from NASA's Curiosity rover and TV, radio and print journalists interview some of the scientists immediately after the press conference.

AGU Fall Meeting: Scientists interacting with journalists

I'll be leaving my work home at AGU soon. Over the past four years, I've been collecting photos of journalists and scientists interacting to use with our Sharing Science materials. My goal has been to show action and for each photo to tell a (short) story. Here are some photos I took at the 2013 and 2014 AGU Fall Meetings:

 The BBC's Rebecca Morelle interviews a scientist after a 2014 Fall Meeting press conference.

A TV crew interviews (left to right) Rolf Hut, Fedor Baart and Olivier Hoes at the 2014 AGU Fall Meeting about their recent findings on whether the Alcatraz escapees could have survived.

Jim Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, gives a TV interview after a 2014 Fall Meeting press conference.

U.S. Rosetta Project Scientist Claudia Alexander of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, gives a live radio interview following a press conference about results from the Rosetta mission at the 2014 AGU Fall Meeting. I was very sad to learn that six months after I took this photograph, Alexander died of breast cancer.

Rebecca Morelle, of the BBC News, gives a live radio broadcast from the 2013 AGU Fall Meeting Press Room.

#SketchYourScience

We're trying a new outreach activity this year in the AGU Booth at our annual Fall Meeting. We're encouraging people to sketch their science, an activity that took off at a recent Ecological Society of America meeting.

My colleague asked me to create some PowerPoint slides to play on the TV screens in the booth during the event. Hopefully these will attract some passers-by! 

I drew everything using the free Paper app on an iPad. I can't wait to see what people draw at the meeting! Follow the #sketchyourscience hashtag on Twitter this Dec. 15-17.

Colorado

Two years ago, I had the chance to travel to an AGU Chapman conference in Colorado. I took my old Canon AE-1 with me, which I had not used in a long time. Clearly, I still have some practicing to do with this camera but the resulting grainy, black and white photos are still fun!

 

PDFs for scientists!

Today, I posted three new tip sheets to our Sharing Science website to help scientists prepare for phone, radio and video interviews. They feature the icons I made the other day because, after all, what good is a tip sheet without a striking visual icon!?

I created the tip sheets in MS Word and the icons in MS PowerPoint. Voila!  

Happy weekend!

Telephone, Radio and Video Icons

Today I created several icons to go with some informational sheets I'm working on. These icons are by no means original, but I still think they turned out nicely and I had fun making them. It certainly wasn't your average day! (At least not for me.)

 

Fall Photo Walk

Last fall at work, we took a photo walk to ease the tension as we all prepared for our big annual meeting. Here are some of my favorite photos from that evening.

 

AGU Fall Meeting: David Perlman and Andrew Grant

David Perlman (left), the legendary science editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, speaks with Science News' Andrew Grant, in the press room during the American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting last month.

Grant received the David Perlman Award for Excellence in Science Journalism–News Award in 2014, accepting his award during the meeting.

The award "recognizes excellence in science news reporting," for stories "prepared with a deadline of one week or less," and comes with a $5,000 prize.

At Andrew's request, I snapped a few photos of him standing with the man for whom the award is named.

ArtJamz: My Painting

We had a big turnout for our ArtJamz event a couple of weeks ago. (I am slow to post.) Almost 30 percent of the staff came, which is awesome. Many of them hung their completed paintings in their cubes, and I have to say, we have many talented artists on staff!

After much deliberation, I chose to recreate this image below of a beach on the Adriatic Sea for my ArtJamz painting.

[Photo of the Cinque Terre (Italy) from vivaboo.com, via Pinterest]

On the day of, I watched as another colleague went to town making an amazing painting of a giraffe using a palette knife and decided to try using one too. She offered me some basic words of wisdom and then I went for it, using the knife to create the sky and clouds in my painting. I'm not in love with how it turned out -- I mixed the colors together too much, I think -- but it sure was fun! I did the rest of the painting with a boring old paintbrush. If you squint, it looks really nice.

I ran out of time before I was able to add the beach goers and little houses, but maybe I'll take it home some day and finish it. Til then, it's a little window into another world on my desk. 

Head shot: AGU Journal Editor

One of our journal editors needed a more professional head shot, so I snapped him during a break in meetings while he was in town a few weeks ago. We did this in our conference room. He stood next to the long table and I craned awkwardly over an end table. It was kind of weird, but it worked.

Photo by Mary Catherine Adams for the American Geophysical Union (AGU) 

I think I would rather shoot against a darker background next time. The biggest struggle in our office, though, is finding a space with good light. We have either cavernous conference rooms and dark hallway corners, or well-lit conference rooms with white walls. I could have taken him outside but I thought I could control the light better if I at least knew which window I was going to stick him next to.