I LOVE COLLABORATING WITH MY PHOTOJOURNALIST COLLEAGUES. With their visuals and my words, we put together online and print packages that tell stories from multiple angles. As the industry has become shorter on staff, however, reporters must be equipped to shoot photos and videos as well. This page comprises samples of visual work I created and/or was a significant part of.
Digging for dinosaurs in Wyoming
In the summer of 2019, The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, which is considered to be the largest children’s museum in the world, invited some members of the international and national media to write about a $27.5 million dig it is leading in the Big Horn Basin in Wyoming. For years, paleontologists have been excavating a dense square mile packed with massive bones, footprints and past plant life. They think it has the potential to significantly further our understanding of the Jurassic Period.
I spent two days on site, interviewing scientists, taking photos and video, and learning about the finds. Then I brought it all back to Indianapolis audiences through photos, video and three stories:
- “The Children’s Museum is digging for dinosaurs in Wyoming. They’ve found amazing things.”
- “Here are some of the biggest finds from The Children’s Museum’s dinosaur dig”
- “I watched scientists dig giant dinosaur bones out of the Wyoming dirt. Here’s what I saw.”
The visuals are in the stories. A photojournalist colleague in our IndyStar newsroom helped me assemble the footage I shot into the video above.
‘Journeys of Note‘
Telling musicians’ stories with words is one way to reach an audience. Producing them on camera in short, sharable Instagram videos will likely reach a bigger one. I came up with the latter idea in order to connect the general public, and the large Instagram classical music community, with Indianapolis classical musicians whose backstories might not be known. I conducted the interviews, and my talented IndyStar videographer colleagues shot and put together the videos, which were posted on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.
Above is one of the six episodes of “Journeys of Note.” (I used the YouTube link because it was easiest to embed.) Find the rest of the episodes here.
A Kansas City native tries Lafayette barbecue
That native is me, and yes, I pitched the story for obvious reasons. In 2015, I sampled three barbecue restaurants’ best dishes in Lafayette, Indiana, and wrote about my reactions. Our videographer recorded the journey.
Photo gallery of a city block party
I shot these photos of the Indianapolis Urban League’s Back-to-School Block Party in the summer of 2018 during my Saturday news shift for IndyStar.
Teens start group to move furniture after Carr Fire
In 2018, the Carr Fire ripped through the Redding, California, area. It left people without homes and with terrible air quality and charred remains of subdivisions. The Redding Record Searchlight newsroom was inundated with stories, so the USA Today Network asked journalists around the country to help out in the aftermath.
That’s how I found my way to a teen group that was moving furniture from donation centers to the new homes residents were setting up. Here are the video and photos I shot and edited, along with the story I wrote.
DOMENICA BONGIOVANNI 