Live from True/False

For my first shift at KOMU I worked with Alex Rozier. The KOMU shift for a convergence reporter consists of shadowing a reporter working on a story for one of the day’s newscasts. The convergence reporter is supposed to observe the person they are following and take still photos related to the story for KOMU’s website. The whole situation was a pleasant surprise. I was a little worried that I would get assigned to a story that didn’t have a very good visual element. Alex was covering the grand opening of the True/False film festival live on the 5:00 and 6:00 newscasts. It was really neat to see how the live spots work. They weren’t able to communicate with the station through the typical channel so they used cell phones and did the story without the ability to hear the cues from the studio broadcast. For my part I took some photos inside the packed box office on Ninth Street. The slideshow I made is running alongside Alex’s story on KOMU.com. You can see the story here.

Let's have an auction

I did my second story for the Missourian this week. This time the editors wanted me to attend a statewide auctioneer competition and create a video of the event for the website. I was pretty intimidated by the project in general because video is definitely the medium I have the least experience with. I was the only member of the press covering the event and as a result I received a lot of attention from the organizers. I feel pretty good about the amount of soundbites and b-roll I was able to get. The big areas for improvement are on the technical side. I didn't think to bring a light so my interviews are extremely dark. We used Final Cut to edit. Because I wasn't familiar with the program the time I could have used to voice the video was taken up by learning the software. I'm glad I've been assigned to do some video this early in the semester. Hopefully it will be less intimidating later if I need to do it for a team story.

Here is a link to the story.

Year of the tiger

I did my first story for the Columbia Missourian on the celebration of the Chinese new year at Jesse Auditorium. The assignment was to accompany the reporter that was writing a story on the event and get audio/photos that would add to her story. As with most reporting projects at this point in my career my thought process started with evaluating my strengths and weaknesses and how they would affect the story. The best way to explain this is to do it in categories.

Audio: Audio is still a bit of a mystery to me. It is probably my favorite medium and if I had been born 50 years ago it would most definitely be my primary focus. To be completely honest here, on this project i focused primarily on getting good photos and let whatever audio I got accompany them. As I’m writing this it occurs to me that i should find some time to focus some attention on creating a good audio story. Perhaps the best way would to go to an event that has audio/visual components and try to create a story that exclusively uses audio to describe it. In the end, I spent a lot of time getting photos together and quickly threw together some audio for this. Probably not the best strategy, but you can only take on so much at once.

Photo: This part of this assignment was the most interesting to me. I don’t know if this is unique to me, but I feel like a still camera to a journalist is as necessary as a notebook and pen. I carry my camera with me to every story I do whether it be a photo gallery or exclusively video. You can’t properly document an event without taking notes and to the same degree I think you cannot document it without still images.

I started the process of documenting this event by consulting one of my convergence professors. I had never shot a stage show in a dark auditorium before, and I knew enough about cameras to suspect that the lens I had would be little use in that setting. My professor confirmed my suspicion and suggested I rent a lens from the school that is quite a bit faster than the one I would have used otherwise. The lens I rented was an 80-200 so I thought I probably wouldn’t be getting any wide angle shots. I should note here that it was really cool to use a lens that can shoot at f 2.8 at 200mm. Taking closeups in the dark from that range is something that had never been possible for me. I shot with that lens and my own d200 camera right up to intermission. During the break I met up with the reporter doing the written story on the event and she asked me to get a shot of a girl she was interviewing in her traditional Chinese dress. I told her I would try and explained that with the equipment I had I would have to be across the room to get more than the center of her face. At this point she told me she had rented a camera from the school and said that I could use that. She then handed me a d700 with a 14-24mm f2.8 lens. She told me I should just hold onto it for the second half and take some shots with both cameras. If you know about cameras you can imagine how exciting this situation was to a guy wanting to get some photo chops on his first assignment. When the show was over I had taken over a thousand pics between the two cameras and was on a high comparable to a child’s after being put in charge on an FAO Schwarz.

I should probably apologize here for all the boring camera talk, but the experience warrants being documented if only for me.

Working with the reporter writing the piece was a really fun experience. After the show we sat together at the convergence desk in the Missourian newsroom for most of the night working on our pieces and taking time to help each other out when needed. She submitted her piece at around 4am and I finished mine a couple of hours later. In the end it ran on the front of the Missourian website for about 12 hours and made the top 30 stories for the paper for the week. All and all a very rewarding experience that reminded me of why I chose to come to journalism school at Mizzou.

Here’s a link to the story.

Camera

I bought a Nikon D200 this week. While I appreciate and enjoy the opportunity to borrow equipment from school, a camera is something I feel like I should own. I'm hoping this will help me get used to thinking like a photographer more of the time. I can't help but feel that developing solid skills with a still camera will help my visual skill set to improve as a whole. Now it's time to practice.

Goodbye to an inspiration!

I don't know what made you feel like we would be better off without you, but you're wrong. It's only a few hours since we heard you wouldn't be around anymore and all we can think about is how much we miss you. I don't know what brings someone to the point of actually ending their own life but it is incredibly tragic. Your smartest and most intuitive friends understand that taking your own life is nothing more than a ploy for attention. The tragedy is inherent in that understanding! So why did you do it? Perhaps you were that unhappy...perhaps you were heartbroken...perhaps the girl you lovrd didn't love you back... perhaps no one wanted to listen to what you had to say. Whichever it was...c'est la vie! Please beat up mj for me!

Last thoughts on Michael Jackson...

I'm beginning to fear that this blog is starting to sound like the incoherent ramblings of a girl experiencing her first period. I should probably correct that by putting an end to the posts about how I feel about my life and where its going and speak more clearly about what I see in the world around me. Michael Jackson died today. An event that not only shut down sources of information that were previously dedicated to more important things, but also brought out a legion of people championing the accomplishments of a man that was, if not fully, at least partially, widely demonized up to the moments before his death. The question isn't, "Was this man a good man?", the question is, "How do we allow ourselves to be so distracted by his passing that the problems we were so concerned about yesterday are suddenly forgotten?". As a wholehearted believer in the importance of the "Fourth Estate", I have to wonder what sort of ideology allows outlets of news who claim to provide the public with the pressing information that they need, to preempt all other potential stories with uninterrupted coverage of the death of one man. A man almost no one was thinking about yesterday. A man who yesterday was merely a misguided pedophile to so many, but somehow today is a hero to any who have the humanity to listen to his story. The reality is he was just a man. A man like any other. No more important than any of the casualties in the Iranian election controversy. No more important than any one of the 9 people that died in a suicide bombing in Baghdad this morning. So why do we care so much more? And, more importantly, why will the outlets we trust to provide us with the "most pressing" news lead with Michael Jackson tomorrow? Perhaps it is a result of an inability to comprehend the value of human life across the borders of nation and class. Perhaps it is because we deify celebrities to a point that obscures all rationality by the admirer and the admired. Whatever the case may be it is paramount to the achievement of empathy and equality that we begin to understand that pain and loss does not know nation or class.

Bears, Beets, and Burkas

The ability to love and speak freely is inherent to the American experience. While it might seem at some times that the United States is falling behind the rest of the world because of their forward thinking attitudes, occasionally something comes along that reveals where our place really is. Perhaps it's our tolerance of free speech that often embarrasses us, but in the end that is all we have to set us apart from other developed nations. The inspiration for this line of reasoning comes from

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/22/sarkozy-burqas-are-not-we_n_218920.html

the statement that French president Nicolas Sarkozy made regarding the Muslim burka. Sarkozy, in an attempt to support women's rights, said that they were not welcome in his country. While his motives may have been sincere the only thing worse than telling people what they can do is telling them what they cant. Denying women the ability to express themselves in a way that you think is oppressive only compounds the problem. Part of me thinks that a person who has the charisma to become the leader of a powerful country like France should already know this, and perhaps he does. Either way, the ban of the burka reeks of the same ban of female sexuality that brought the burka in to existence in the first place.