I skipped out on making a year in review for 2019 -- I didn't feel I had enough work starting my new job as the photographer/videographer at St. Edward's University in late spring with virutally no students on campus in the summers, really only leaving me with the fall semester to create. Turns out 2020 followed nearly the same schedule, but I couldn't skip out this time on what has now become one of the monumental years of our lives, unfortunately for terrible reasons. Like just about everyone else living on this earth in 2020, I had a lot of plans personally and professionally for this year, and they got absolutely obliterated thanks to the pandemic.

In January, I was wrapping up photographing for our spring magazine; in February, I was focused on photographing Homecoming, a week filled with festivities and gatherings; in March, just days before the world changed, I spent two full days photographing graduate students as part of our biennial grad refresh project. From mid-March to mid-August, I didn't photograph a single soul for St. Edward's. In the spring, I was terrified of the coronavirus and so grateful that the university closed in-person campus operations and allowed us to work from home, though the photojournalist in me felt like I was missing pivotal moments of telling students, faculty and staff's stories in that time period. So much happened in those months with the evolution of the pandemic and higher education that I unfortunately was not able to photograph due to our circumstances and my work schedule.

That said, I did my best to document everything when we got back to our "new normal" in the fall semester. My team has continued to be remote and will be through the entirety of 2021, though I have been to campus nearly weekly to photograph or film. A large part of my job used to be spontaneous -- wander around campus and document what was happening -- or to capture the energy at the multitude of university events. Nowadays, everything is carefully planned and scheduled as I photograph and film minimal people with minimal contact in minimal time. Because of this and the lack of things happening on campus due to the majority of the year being remote, my work became comprised of lots and lots of portraits.

I also created more video than ever: In the first two months of the pandemic, I published 57 videos on St. Ed's YouTube channel. For perspective, the previous 57 videos were published over the course of a little over 2 years! All of the video in the spring and a good portion in the fall was made from user-submitted video, but I was finally able to start filming my own footage again in August. I've always considered myself a photographer who can do video rather than a true videographer, but the pandemic pushed me to grow in both my filming and post-production capabilities. It was a stressful crash course at times, but it helped me grow so much as a videographer and an editor.

St. Ed's is still mostly virtual for the spring semester, with fall semester plans being more evenly split between in person and virtual, so what I can photograph and film will continue to be limited. That said, I'm glad to turn the page on 2020 and look to a more hopeful, more creative future in 2021.