A Photo J Student

About a month ago I spent an evening and a morning with my grandparents. Their daughter and son-in-law live with them and care for them. This was a hard trip for me for two main reasons, I think.

One, I usually just see my grandparents at Thanksgiving, Christmas, the occasional family lunch, etc. I think it’s easy for anyone to fake it for a meal. Or an hour or two. On the days I spent with them, I saw how confused my granddad is, saw him have his face cleaned for him, watched him get dressed under his daughter’s supervision, saw him fall asleep sitting up at 8:30 in the morning just because he was bored.

So I saw the messy, awkward behind the scenes stuff.

I also had to be able to dissociate myself from them as family, and just be a journalist; tell their story. I want to do the careful balancing act of being a journalist and being a human, and this was a good test. It seems kind of backwards, but I think I was better able to honor my aging grandparents by being more of a journalist than a grandson, at least for those 6 or 7 hours.

Here’s a slideshow profiling the Twice As Nice resale shop off of the square.

This Washington Post piece is well done.

I guess some might grumble about the lack of natural sound, but I think it was edited that way intentionally. The eerie stillness of the environmental shots (both movement-wise and sound-wise) helps the viewer get the point quickly: it’s a dead neighborhood. I think somber piano music, like in some pieces I’ve seen, would have made it moodier, but I think that would be manipulative. The silence does a good job of telling the story.

The story kind of meanders and doesn’t really move forward, but it adds to the feel that this lady has an uneventful, wandering over to the one neighbor’s house kind of life. If this was the reporter’s intention, then this works well.

What doesn’t work well is the shaky-cam shots. They’re a bit distracting and come across as shoddy camera work.

True, not much happens in the piece, but isn’t that the point?

I spent time with my neighbor, Frederick McKee, when he was practicing and getting ready for an orchestra concert last Wednesday.  Here’s the slide show chronicling his evening.

I’m working on an audio slide show about my neighbor, Frederick McKee.  The completed slide show will be up by the end of the weekend, and these are a few of the photos that will be included.

Aaron Chimbel has a one-of-a-kind job at wfaa.com.  He’s their Mobile Journalist, or MoJo, as he enthusiastically blurted during his introduction to some UNT journalism students yesterday morning.  He is a one man “team” who tells two to three multimedia stories a day that he posts directly to wfaa.com from the field.  Like I said, cool job, embarrassing name.

Aaron’s stories are mostly quirky features and “local flavor” pieces, but he’s also done some storm chasing and spot news.  All of his pieces were pretty polished; especially considering his ridiculous deadlines and the fact that he used a Black Jack phone to record some of his video.

He has an amazing amount of freedom and next to no oversight from editors.  He’s proven himself trustworthy and creative, and now he’s pretty much on his own.  This is a pretty romantic idea, at least on paper.  One journalist drives around with a slick little video camera, some mics and a MacBook Pro with a wireless internet card, generating stories and uploading them as he goes.

The idea sounds fun, but I don’t think I could pull it off.  I need feedback and people.  I think I would lose my mind if I had Aaron’s job.  He definitely has the personality for this gig.  He was pretty full of life and ideas and jokes at 9 a.m.  I’m not even capable of basic human interaction until 11 a.m. or two cups of coffee (whichever comes first.)

I’m expected to shoot a photo story every week for Picture Editing. My first subject was the parking guys at the Village Church.

Site #1

The Ease History project has a pretty slick flash-based site. The enormous scope of the project is really impressive. There are hundreds of multimedia entries for historical events, campaign ads and what the site dubs “core values” (constitutional principles, etc.).

The site is really easy to navigate. I only had to assess the main screen for a split second, and in another few seconds I was watching ridiculous campaign ads from 1952.

The quality of graphics, photos and video are definitely up to web browsers’ expectations, but what really makes this site shine is the HUGE amount of easy-to-consume information that’s available.

Site #2

On the other hand, msnbc’s “Spam Wars” interactive piece was a dud. The first “interactive” piece was simply a frame within the page that had different expandable headings when clicked. The information was OK, but there was not much to thrill the average websurfer.

The second interactive piece opened a new window on my computer. It was supposed to be about the “Top Ten Spammers.” I clicked each of the names (presumably of spammers) on the left and got a giant page filled with script errors as a result. I suppose other computers might not have this issue, but it’s definitely important that pages advertised as interactive keep the reader’s attention and actually WORK.

Site #3

One of my all time favorite multimedia pieces is The Marlboro Marine by LA Times photographer Luis Sinco. This piece, presented in two parts and an epilogue, not only tells a great story and has great photos, but it shows the attachment reporter and source can develop.

The storyline is incredible. It is both emotionally satisfying and jarring. It’s a “reality of war” story. There are photos from combat, but Sinco mostly illustrates the horrendous internal struggle a lot of veterans experience. It’s hard to show what’s going on in a person’s mind in photographs, but Sinco nails it. It’s appropriate that Sinco does a video interview about Miller and him for the epilogue. I think his insight and recounting of the photographer/photographed relationship adds a lot of depth to the story.

The Marlboro Marine’s story is definitely one worth telling.