The American Boychoir and Alumni Choir, eighty men and boys, spanning six decades, present their Annual Homecoming Concert at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, 801 West Street, Trenton. Inside the church, with violins and cellos playing and those voices, the sound was beyond understanding.

Now that Spring has arrived...


Last Saturday night I saw my best friend and his wife and they told me they were thinking of calling me because earlier that day two neighborhood girls were hanging around outside reading in the mild weather. Well they were hanging around alright, up in a tree reading. Since I was working the next day I said to give me a call if they climb up there again and they did, so off I went and here it is.

When it ran in the paper, editor Bill Mooney used the headline "Library branches."

How much personality can one three-year-old have? Here's your answer. Ryan Schultz, 3, who has been diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, is the center of attention, in this family photo. (The kid is a total charmer.) His father, David, left, has started a foundation called Ryan's Quest, "to increase awareness of Duchenne muscular dystrophy with the purpose of allocating funds for research that has the greatest potential of finding a cure or treatment for this disease." Most patients are wheelchair dependent by age 12. Life expectancy varies from early teens to age mid 30s. Ryan's mom, Maria is at right feeding Ryan's one-month-old brother, Mason.

In my own personal version of March Madness, here are two more basketball photos, with a twist. One is action from a Rider University game on Sunday March 1st. That's Ryan Thompson for Rider. His older brother Jason graduated Rider and now plays for the NBA's Sacramento Kings. I photographed their parents for a story and they are a crazy couple! Crazy in a good way.

This one is Steinert High School teacher Tracy Quinn, in her classroom. When she played for Hamilton High School, her team won the state championship, coached by a great guy and former band mate of mine, Mickey Kessler. He forgot more about basketball than I'll ever know.

Lisa Lenihan, of Hamilton, holds her six week old son Liam, for the distribution of ashes during a lunchtime Ash Wednesday service at St. Gregory the Great Church on Nottingham Way in Hamilton Township, New Jersey. I wonder what Liam is giving up for Lent.

I've been to a few basketball games these past days. The big photo, above right, was from the Sovereign Bank Arena in Trenton. I went up as high as I could (press box) and got a clear background when I finally got a guy going up for a shot, facing the right way. At regular old high school gyms, the bleachers don't go way up, so I usually go low, on the floor to be exact and sometimes the players do, too.

On Friday I got to spend a couple of hours hanging out with and photographing two homeless teens for the do1thing project at HomeFront's Huchet House, in Trenton, New Jersey, a place where family care workers and a parent educator focus on ensuring pregnant homeless women receive needed services like prenatal care and employment training. I tried something different, too, my first foray into slideshows with audio. I had just purchased a digital audio recorder, for two reasons, they have really come way down in price and my sister had given me a B&H Photo gift card for my birthday. It was delivered on Wednesday and I brought it with me as an afterthought to Huchet House and got a very little bit of reluctant audio from the girls before I left. It took me most of Saturday to learn how to edit the audio and incorporate it into a slideshow using various "new to me" programs. After I sent my still photos and slideshows to do1thing, I posted the slideshows on my own webspace. Each one is roughly thirty seconds long. I only had a couple of hours to be in their worlds, but it seems even stranger to try and tell their story in thirty seconds.

You can see them here:


www.MichaelMancuso.us/Yakima

www.MichaelMancuso.us/Tamara