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.
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