The New Internship

I just started my summer internship a few days ago and the first photos are starting to hit the web. My internship with with NOW Newspapers or Community Newspapers Inc. This internship in unpaid with 20 hours a week of work. Its great even though its unpaid. I get to go cover real assignments its great fun!

The first photo gallery just hit the web today. You should check it out http://www.greendalenow.com/multimedia/photos/96299479.html?index=1

I will keep you all informed

I get to do some fun assignments, not saying graduation is the best, but there will be some good ones. Like photographing some Brewers players the other day. Thats not up yet. I will keep you all in the loop. As the great Joe McNally always says more tk...

Spring Term

So spring is here. Sort of. It's still very cold, but spring is here. I am gad about next year's addition to The Knox Student's editor staff. Erin Daugherty will be joining me and she is super excited about learning. She comes in with a lot of photography knowledge, but lacking much digital and photojournalism knowledge. That doesn't scare me one bit because of her work ethic.

The 70-200mm lens was sent in on Monday and hopefully will be back on Monday. It's difficult to shoot sports with my 28-75mm being the longest lens.

I have started to write more articles and I will be writing a softball story this week and I'm glad to be doing it!

I also got a Cannon 7D. Its a whole new focus system and with my 3rd party lenses it isn't very reliable to get focus unless on the simple spot focus mode. But it still is a great improvement from my old camera. The ISO range is great even if theres a large amount of nose in the upper register. Also the ability to HD video is going to come in handy because of the growth of importance in multimedia in journalism.

I took a 200 level photojournalism course last term and for the final project I photographed the Knox baseball team. This involved a lot of indoor shots and a focus on emotions more than action. Unfortunately the shot i picked this time is more of an action shot.

Perturbed

First I would like to say what I say in the post did not effect this weeks paper nor will it effect next weeks because the photos I published have already been chosen. Secondly I am very proud of the papers we have been putting out this year especially this weeks and last weeks. I would like to mention Matthew Wheaton who is doing a great job at pushing himself to produce a better sports section each week. It looks better every week. Also a big shout out to Evan Temchin who does so much work (some that goes unnoticed) each week. Without him we would have a crappy paper.

Now to the story that brought so much stress last night to the whole staff. Very late Monday night/Tuesday morning I e-mailed a director of a play that is showing this weekend if I could come take photos of a dress rehearsal to publish in the paper. He quickly replied that I could come either Tuesday or Wednesday. I sent him back an e-mail saying that I would be coming on Tuesday. I did, and I took pictures. I was told during the run through not to run photos of certain scenes. I listened but still took photos for the review since his reasoning was that he didn't want the play spoiled. Then a few hours later after I left the play when I was leaving the building after a jazz combo practice he stopped me and asked if I could e-mail all the pictures. I kindly asked him what for. He said to have (later I learned that he wanted to use them for his own promotion on Facebook and elsewhere. Also so he could chose the photos that we ran). I said no because I did not want to give him the rights to my photos and because of previous actions of this director last year with other photos for the paper.

He came into the publications office on Wednesday night. This part of the story is extremely long. It boils down some long arguments with him. We offered some concessions, but he refused. We talked it over with our advisor and decided to run my photo. I would like to publish a photo on my blog, but because of the controversy I will withhold to prevent him trying to press legal actions against me.

I love this photo though. I am sorry my good friend Alex Rauland who will most likely disagree with the quality of this photo. She did save the goal. This is a great picture because the focus is sharp on her and the Monmouth player is out of focus. This is good for our paper because we focus on Knox sports and don't have to have an unbiased photo to go along with the story. Theres a tiny bit of motion blur in the Monmouth player, but thats not a big deal since she is already out of focus. The fall foliage provides a wonderful backdrop to this photo. It shows that it is near the end of the season. I can think where some people would want a different angle to this photo, but I disagree because there is some unnoticeable space between the two players and you wouldn't have the goal net in the background.

School has started

School has started three days ago and I have had my first meeting to discuss the creation of my self directed major of Visual Communications. I have a lot of work ahead of me this term and that is why I decided to only take 2.5 credits instead of the normal 3. All my new lenses are giving me some good pictures. Next in line is an upgrade of my camera body. My Tokina 12-24mm is giving me a little problem when switching between manual and automatic focus, but I will send in the lens at some point to get that fixed. I just got home from the football game that we lost. I got some good photos from that with my 70-200mm Tamron. I have figured out that TKS is going to be a major time commitment and I'm going to try my best to keep up the quality of photos in the paper. I will try to keep posting on this blog during the year even during busy times.

This week's photo is from a soccer game last week against Benedictine University. This photo is strong and shows motion, effort and action. The only small problem is there is almost a bit too much motion blur in the players' hands. This is because this was shot near the end of the game and the sun was setting. The bodies and heads of the players are still for the most part so this is still a good photo.

Update: This photo actually wont be used since the game was from before the freshman issue of the paper and its now 3 weeks old. I hope to get it into the paper some time as an archived photo.

New Book

I just purchased a book from Half Price Books Called Photographer's Market 2008 edition. And it is full of freelance jobs and other places to make money with photography. This will hopefully help me pay for college with jobs I enjoy and help me further my skills during the times of the year when I am not working for the Knox Student. I haven't found anything yet in the book, but I found some interesting possibilities for next summer. Also in the same stream I helped an old high school friend with her senior photos on Sunday. It was fun, but I found it challenging to keep ideas on different spots and different poses coming. I like candid photography more, but I was still able to produce some nice pictures. She had planed, before I offered myself, to take pictures by herself with her point and shoot and the self timer. For the sake of her parents having nice photos to keep for a long time I volunteered to help. They turned out well and if they had a photo journalistic element I would put them up here but instead I have another picture from my farm project.

This weeks photo is of Kevin working on Kevin and his father's farm. In this photo he is checking the grain levels in the planter and deciding if he needs to add more. This picture shows an amazing blue sky that I just love about this photo. I wish I had my wide angle lens (which most likely I'll be getting for my birthday (Thank you Parents!)) for this picture. This picture has a very wide angle feeling to it. with the lid of the planter running from the top of the photo to the center. The one problem I would see with this photo is that the subject is very small. Nothing is blown out white or completely black in the shot which is a nice part ascetically.

Sports

This weeks photo comes from me from the Knox-Monmouth rivalry football game. This year it was at Monmouth, but we still covered it because of its importance and because Monmouth is not that far away. It was a very cold day and actually started snowing during the game. Bring good gloves when shooting outdoors. cold weather freezes your hands very fast when taking photos. I struggled to keep taking photos during this game because my hands were close to being frozen. Also being on away turf you have to be able to take some verbal abuse. I was wearing purple gloves and the opposing fans quickly spotted me as being from Knox. Most of the time I just laughed at what they were saying, but it's important to stay focused on the assignment. In this photo you can see the struggle in the player's face. Also you see both motion with some blur, but also a sharp focus on most of the subject. Its a strong photo and has no noticeable issues to it.

It is just a bit over a month till I return to school and help work on the freshman issue of the Knox Student (www.theknoxstudent.com). I am super excited about it. I am struggling to figure out what 70-200mm lens to buy, but I'll solve it one way or another.

The Future

The future of photojournalism is not the brightest star in the sky. Print news is struggling at best. Many media sources are using viewer submitted photos. But we must keep professional photojournalism a thriving career because once we go all news print will die, online news will lose something and even news on the TV will be hurt. I know I've stated similar thing in the past, but this is an important topic.

This week's picture posed many difficulties. It was of a concert of two choirs and the Galesburg symphony. In a concert situation you can't take as many pictures as you want. You have to aim for loud moments so your camera's shutter isn't heard by the concert goers. I have only started to figure that out at this concert and will try my best to do the same in future assignments where my camera might cause a major distraction to attendees. Also the spot I was located required me to be on my knees for the whole concert. As you can see by the picture lighting was also an issue for this picture. There were spots of brightness and spots of dark. this was also amplified by the men wearing white and the women wearing black. You can see the top left corner is a spot of blown out white while only a row down you have a singer who is under exposed because she does not have a light on her. Also It was difficult to crop this picture to minimize the amount of head chopped in half. The cropping I did on this only has one head chopped in half. There are some hands that don't have bodies to go with them, but that is less of a problem. I remember that the cropping done to this picture for the paper removed the two trombones at the bottom of the picture. This frustrated me a bit because it helps show that it wasn't just a choir concert, but there was also a symphony.

The school year starts up in less than two months for almost everyone. I am excited to see that I have already found a few incoming freshman interested in taking photos for the paper. Next year will be busy with me trying to join my co photo editor and the managing editor with the creation of my own major similar to theirs. Also I will be applying for an internships at newspapers for next summer. The time in between will be filled with Jazz band, editing photos, and homework. It will be a busy year, but it will be filled with what I love.