Still Photojournalism Project

I choose to write about a presentation comprised entirely of still photos. I believe this story was a bit famous, but I still wanted to talk about it because it remains one of my favorite multimedia pieces ever. The presentation is a five part series of a 40 year old woman dying of liver cancer. What is really remarkable about this piece is that there are so many elements within the five pieces that flow so well together. I really liked the element of love between the woman and her new husband, but I also really enjoyed the reaction of the women's children, and how many of the photos concerned how they were handling their mother's death.
What really appealed to me in this presentation was the color of the photos, the sections in which the photos were divided into, and the voice overs from the children, and the woman herself. I like when a photographer decides to leave his photos in color, instead of converting them to black and white for a classier look. I think that the color photos work really well with this presentation, and I don't think black and white photos would have done the same justice to the presentation.
I really liked that the photos were separated into five sections because it breaks up the story a bit, which is nice at times because some of the images and speech are a lot to handle all at once. I also liked it because the pictures of the woman dying could be offensive or hurtful to some people. I also really liked the voice overs from her children because sometimes when a cancer story is told, the focus is on the individual suffering, rather than on the affect that the suffering has on that person's loved ones. I think the children play a crucial role in the presentation because they bring the story back down to earth and give it more of a human face. The most striking conversation to me within the entire piece (which was the best thing to include in my opinion), was whether the woman's youngest son would remember her face and voice once she had died. I think its little things like those voiceovers that really hit people hard and stay with them after the presentation was over.
Although I liked the photos separated into sections, I don't like the pictures of the woman actually dying, even though they are really powerful. I feel as if the pictures of her dying were put there for a shock factor, and I don't think that this presentation need a shock factor in order for the rest of the photos to be considered outstanding. I thought it was a little disrespectful for the Concord Monitor to show these photos in a way, even if the family agreed to it, because I think showing the affects on the cancer on others, including the victim, instead of pinning the word cancer on another face is more effective. Pictures of the woman dying defiantly hindered the piece for me.
Overall, however, I think the piece was really well done, and there is a clear, beginning, middle and end, although I would have liked to see more of her life before the cancer, though i realize that her last weeks with cancer were the main focus of the piece.

Here is he link to the presentation.
CLICK ME!


I will also post those pictures of before and after of Val tonight.

NPR Multimedia

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112958877

I want to be able to do this by the end of this class.

Multimedia Project

Here are the six pictures I choose for my photojournalism project this week. Our Assignment was to capture emotion, and I think I did that moderately well. My biggest issue with the AmPm pictures were capturing shots in the dark without using a flash. I had to use a flash when taking crowd shots, but I couldn't when taking pictures of the actual band members because it made the pictures look a little washed out. Here are the two pictures out of the 100 I took at their show on Thursday night. It was their last show with the bassist and with their name, since they are losing both. The show was at the Stone Church and the turn out wa amazing. The band is pretty well known around the Seacoast area, and around the eastern and central coast of America after a tour that went down to South Carolina and back. They even opened for Guster last spring at the Whittemore Center.




These next photos are from the football game against Dartmouth on Saturday. It was the Granite Bowl, and UNH dominated. I sat at the entrance to the bleachers and took pictures of everyone that was flooding through the doors. I felt a little strange, but the last thing I wanted was to set something else and get fake emotion. The one of the football player hugging what I think is his mother, I took standing on the bleachers, looking down at the field. I had gone to the bottom of the bleachers to try and get some shots of the players practicing, but I saw a player and his family and they were all laughing and smiling, so I knew that this would be a good opportunity. I think the pictures here came out well too.

Seasonal Alerigies

This week we had to do an NPR like story for class. I love NPR, but I knew that was a very high standard to live up to. I think that my group made a timely, journalist piece, but still added our own spin on it in the form of the theme song from Rocky. If you're curious, I have uploaded it up here to the left of this post.

We participated in the annual Oyster River Cleanup last Saturday. It was us, and two other faculy members who showed up and NO ONE else. which was sad because it is our drinking water. We got some pretty good sound clips when we were cleaning, along with the sneezes and nose blowing of my seasonal allergies. We only had the chance to interview one faculty member at the event itself, since the other left before we got back to the meeting spot. Luckily, we were able to call her up and ask her some questions on Monday before sitting down to edit.

I think the final project came out well. i don't like it as much as the Breaking New Grounds piece, but I think it meets the standards of the assignment.

Thanks to Dick Wehrick and Michelle Chapman from the UNH Office of Sustainability.

The Battle of the "Ummmm".

For my first multimedia project, we were assigned to find an unsung hero on campus and create an audio presentation on what they do to make the campus run. Val, Nicki and I decided to do an employee from Breaking New Grounds, which serves much of campus with delicious coffee to help them complete their work and classes. We took out an audio recorder and went to the Durham location last week and interviewed two employees, as well as some B roll. When we went in to edit the clips on Sunday, we were confronted with the reality that I hadn't saved the clips properly, which meant none of our sound clips existed anymore. Discouraged, we rented out another audio recorder and went down to BNG again to record a second set of B roll and sounds. This time was easier since we knew exactly what we wanted for sounds and what questions we needed answered. When we were done, we hurried to the lab to start editing. The first issue that we came across was the amount of background noise in many of the talking clips. When we tried to edit it out through the noise removal tool in Audacity, we made the girl voice sound almost robotic. The second, and really more pressing issue, that we came across was the amount of "um's" and "like's" she spoke in all of her sentences. It was quite outrageous and really very daunting for all three of us. The question that arises with these um's is whether to take them out of her dialogue, and possibly risk losing some of her pronunciation, or keep them in, and possibly have the um's really affect the flow and sound of the piece. We decided to edit out the um's, and we did lost some of her pronunciation, especially at the end of sentences, I am pleased because her interview came out well. We ended up picking a really good song for the background music. We finished last night, after editing almost constantly yesterday and I'm really excited to hear what Sandy and the rest of the class thinks. I think this is the first time in a long time that I've completed something for a journalism class that I've actually been proud of. Hopefully this will set the tone for the rest of the class. I'll see if I can upload, somehow...

First Blog Entry

I found this photo on the Lens Blog, the photojournalism blog by The New York Times, and I immediately thought that it somewhat summed up what I hope for in the future of journalism, and coupled with that, what I fear for the future as well. This photo is of a fireman standing in front of one of the uncontrolled fires that has been destroying much of California's forests. His name is not given, and neither is any information about him, except that, obviously, he is helping to fight the fire. That is one of the major reasons that this photo caught my eye, the fact that he is simply a face to a story, with no recognition of name or rank or seniority. Yet, his face and involvement in the impact that the picture has is undeniable.

This is what I hope for in the future of not just print journalism, but photojournalism as well. The quality and impact of a story determined not by a famous name, but by the no name, real person who is involved because it affects them directly, not because they're being paid to, or because they have to. The stories, pictures, interviews I like reading or listening to the most are those that involve more nameless individuals, rather than those abundant in well known religious leaders, politicians and activists. In the picture above, the man's face is stern, passionate, and focused. He has volunteered to fight fires because it was what he loved to do, not because he thought his picture might gain some notoriety in the NYT someday.

These media hungry fiends are what I fear in the future for journalism, and not only that, but the attention and coverage they receive from audiences. When Michael Jackson died, the news stations coverage of his passing was so constant that I almost forget that there were other events occurring in the world around me. Even after the million dollar funeral, the media kept reporting because it seemed as if that's what people wanted to hear. As a journalist and informed citizen, it scares me to think that we, as a society, are slowly moving away from an appreciation of not only the worldly and local news, but from an appreciation for the no name, passionate individuals that I mentioned above. The fact that so many people were entranced more on the repeated news about a toxicology report TBA in 4 weeks, then the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is astounding to me. I can only hope, that a desire for real news in the future will grow, and not falter.