#wsupj

My final project this semester for photojournalism class: photographs from the opening day at Greenfield Village! The interviews present were conducted a week afterward, once the insane crowds frothing for a visit to the open-air museum calmed down, and I met some fun people those days.

This video, essentially an animated slideshow set to dialogue, was cobbled together on Lightworks, a mostly free video editing software program I was advised to work with by a geologist friend of mine at Wayne State. I’ll post the individual photos in two sets later tonight, along with an accompanying essay, but the most IMPORTANT element is the video! It was all one heck of a ride, though, let me tell you.

This was such a strange topic to cover, compared to my other shoots this semester. The nature of photojournalism (and, honestly, regular journalism to a degree) itself is largely rooted in candid photography: hanging alongside the action, taking photos and angling so as not to be obnoxious, hedging and striving to be part of the background as a top priority, a recorder but not a player.

Portraits are a separate ballpark entirely.

The process of establishing a shoot for portraiture is in diametric opposition to what journalism typically strives for, and is more in line with classical photo methods: the subject (in the case I dealt with last week, the very gracious Ms. Sharon Mayweathers) is fully aware of the photographer’s presence, may be receptive to direction, and usually stares down the photographer to some degree with a piercing or knowing gaze. That awareness of action, and the potential of interaction between photographer and subject, adds this surreal dimension of “hey, wow, I feel like a film director” to the mix. My preferred specialty is ambient/landscape shots, so having to lean around and reangle shots while a living, breathing person is standing there holding a pose? It’s nothing like what I’ve done before (a phrase I say almost every week in this class, because it’s still true)!

Lighting was a severe frustration during my photoshoot. The most visually appealing areas in the Campbell Branch Library, to my eye, were in the center of the building, turned away from the library patrons congregating at the circulation and reference desks, and not drawing undue background participants on the internet computers... which left us mainly with the street and windows as backgrounds.

(the mural, also interesting to look at, would’ve overwhelmed the scene, I think)

The trouble with the windows as a backdrop meant that half my photos were slightly washed out from the glare (but Ms. Mayweathers was captured more visibly), and the other half, once compensated for reciprocity, had the windows and books more evenly lit, but Ms. Mayweathers was left shadowed. Working around her schedule kept the session from being too long, and reduced the amount of pictures and angles I took before we had to pack up and leave, but she made it work! Can’t overlook that human element, either. The headshot was thankfully uneventful, and turned out wonderful. (this one distracting thermostat made maneuvering irritating against the wall, but we got around it okay.)

Shooting for sports was so strikingly different than working on any other assignment before or hence, for quite the gaggle of reasons. The bulk of my photos I’d had to take up until this point (the ten showcasing a host of standard photographic techniques, event coverage, random encounter “enterprise” photographs) were incidental, largely: when I was out looking for these visually interesting opportunities, the chance for the picture was based out of luck, but not NECESSARY. If the shot lined up through my viewfinder had been missed, there would be another somewhere else, and if THAT meant seeking a second event, then so be it!

With sporting events, though, any opportunity for a grand moment passes by fast as a blinking eye. Shutter speed, by virtue of the rapidfire action on-field, becomes even more vital to consider as a result. One of the biggest elements of reciprocity was that shutter speed (depth-of-field shots became impossible when that damnable chain link fence obscured so many shots, and was not only inescapable, but ruined a few pictures), as the pitch was reasonably well-lit by virtue of natural sunshine on a lovely afternoon, but intermittently overcast, so that continuous finnicking with film speed and shutter speed were absolutely vital to maintaining visual quality. (mea culpa: I botched more than a few brilliant shots due to washout or pitch blackness, and far too many because of manual focus. ugh.)

Until a classmate tipped me off beforehand, I hadn't considered the bureaucratic and courteousness elements of the equation: asking for permission ahead of time, through the administrative staff. Now, while journalistic freedoms allow (theoretically) the picture-taking of nearly anybody, plenty of schools and teams restrict press access on their private grounds, and need a vetting or approval form signed beforehand. As my feature covered the Wayne State University softball team, my prerequisite involved signing a quote-unquote “responsibility agreement.” This meant not using the players’ likenesses for advertisement, immediate financial gain or debasement, essentially, and that I wouldn’t sublet their images to any other entities. Easy enough for me, a student with only a blog and a couple social media accounts, but if I’d been a professional photographer, these could have potentially handicapped me in any licensure agreements in the future.

TOP: Wayne State hitter Allie Buchanan is tagged out at first by Grand Valley State's Marianne Deppe during the softball match doubleheader Sunday, at Wayne State University's Gary L. Bryce softball field in Detroit. The match, the second of two, went to Grand Valley State, a 0-4 loss for Wayne State.

MIDDLE: Courtney Reinhold, a Grand Valley State softball pitcher, cheers in the visiting team dugout during the softball match doubleheader Sunday, at Wayne State University's Gary L. Bryce softball field in Detroit. The second game, pictured, was won 0-4 by Grand Valley State, while the first was won 1-0 by home team Wayne State.

I’ve had a lifelong fascination for photography, but never had the finances, time, or opportunity to get involved in it for nearly my entire life: until I got my first flip-phone with a camera in my senior year of high school, I’d never owned either a cell phone nor a working digital camera, and not until senior year of COLLEGE (last month) had I even had a smartphone’s camera to work with. Virtually everything in my knowledge on camera work, from good angles, perspective lines, shadows, what an “ISO” or an “f/stop” are, the meaning of “1/125″ in regards to anything or whether that was fast or slow, the different buttons that make magic happen on this Daguerre sorcery in my hands--it all came about in the last six or seven weeks!

There’s an intensely fun awkwardness involved in taking vibrant, interesting photographs, I’ve noticed during this project: obtaining a neat angle for a picture that captures the viewer’s attention, hemming in the subject while making them seem larger-than-life (if you’re lying prone on the floor aiming up at them) or smaller (if leaning precipitously overhead from a railing), snagging the right moment of motion without ruining the ambience or blatantly intruding, these in themselves are, uh, snapshots of an art form, pardon the pun. Balancing the ISO (the film’s sensitivity to light, in more traditional photographic work), the f/stop (aperture size, with 4 being wide-open and selectively focused and 32 being narrow and more encompassing), and the shutter speed (each speed being measured in fractions of a second; 1/4000 is one-four thousandths of a second, while 1″ is a solid second of time-lapse) against each other’s countervailing properties of brightness, dimness, focus, blur, and grain is delicate. Any misstep of these elements can ruin a photo, or certainly diminish it in the eyes of the beholder.

Moving beyond the elements of a picture ... would be a mea culpa, that of the procrastinator. Waiting until the last moment to take exacting, visually striking, and specific images, edit them, and post them properly along with a similarly procrastinated accompanying “what I learned today is!” synopsis ... it’s a recipe for disaster. OBVIOUSLY. Leaving all that work and diligence until the sixteenth hour, buried under a deluge of other classes’ homework, essays, studies, the predestined commute to and from school, work, sustaining a relationship and friendships--if you waste the necessary time on navel-gazing and doing nothing productive (like I did) instead of a more leisurely paced work environment and planning home- and schoolwork around life events (which I did NOT), you’ll be in trouble.

Ten photos of ten different photographic techniques! This is my first “big assignment” for photojournalism, and I’m rather proud of these. Each image has the photographic technique, ISO, shutter speed, and f/stop as a caption when the image is viewed full screen, but they’re also listed below for simplicity’s sake, with date and location captions.

1) Shallow Depth of Field (ISO 800, 1/125 Shutter Sp., f/3.5) - Starbucks cup at the Apple Store, Somerset Collection, March 1, 2017.

2) Wide Depth of Field (ISO 1600, 1/25 Shutter Sp., f/16) - Starbucks cup at the Apple Genius Bar, Somerset Collection, March 1, 2017.

3) Stopped Action (ISO 3200, 1/400 Shutter Sp., f/4) - Four Angels Fountain, Somerset Collection, March 1, 2017.

4) Blurred Action (ISO 400, 1/13 Shutter Sp., f/10) - Automotion at La Pita, Wayne State University, February 15. 2017.

5) Panned Action (ISO 400, 1/13 Shutter Sp., f/10) - Hurried Crossing, Wayne State University, February 15, 2017.

6) Rule of Thirds (ISO 3200, 1/250 Shutter Sp., f/5.6) - Elevated Elevator Curiosity, Somerset Collection, March 1, 2017.

7) Perspective (ISO 1600, 1/50 Shutter Sp., f/5.6) - Big Beaver Bridge, Somerset Collection, March 1, 2017.

8) Silhouette (ISO 3200, 1/15 Shutter Sp., f/5.6) - A Slight Fan of Shadows, Dearborn, February 17, 2017.

9) Extreme Lighting (ISO 1600, 1/50 Shutter Sp., f/10) - On A Bus Going Nowhere Fast, New Center, March 1, 2017.