I’ve delivered this rant, in some form, every time someone has asked me about what happened at UMass two weekends ago, on the day of the Blarney Blowout.
Usually, when someone makes this inquiry, they use the word “riot”. I want to make it unequivocally clear, I think the use of the word “riot” to describe the events that took place on Saturday March 8th are not only incorrect, but contribute to the continued misunderstanding of what took place, and the discrediting of the reputation of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Continue reading →
There is one rule of photography: don’t photograph your friends for their professional plans or endeavors as a favor.
There are reasons for this: if you’re doing professional work, you are a professional, and should be treated like one (paid). Work is really only professional if it is couched in professionalism, otherwise, it’s probably a hobby. If you don’t ask to be paid now, you won’t be asked how much it costs in the future.
There’s another reason why you shouldn’t do professional work for people in a non-professional capacity: your real life will come back like a howling demon, and your friend will be left hanging while you deal with stuff that actually pays the bills, or keeps you in coffee, or ensures you can buy peanut-butter cups at Trader Joe’s.
I visited a friend earlier this year who is starting up an online business, and was trying to figure out a way to get photos. I volunteered when I visited her, mostly because I was interested in trying my hand at some portraiture, a more creative endeavor than the grind of photojournalism. This was two days before I went back to school.
Now, she’s taken to hounding me via text message about her photos, while I’ve been trying to juggle my reading, organizing the anchoring schedule for the radio station (which has been a nightmare and a half on it’s own), building a routine, and running from meeting to meeting, before, after, and between my classes.
Last night, I went to bed early because I had my first migraine in two weeks, and it laid me out like a blow to the skull. This was after it smacked me across the face during a recruitment meeting, and scrambled my words until I was making a fool out of myself for every person who came over to talk to us.
The problem with unpaid work, on the consumer end, is that you aren’t getting a professional job. Because the “professional” part of the job, isn’t the act, it’s carrying it through. The professional part of any work is the deadline. And really, when someone offers to take your picture, it’s because it’s something they’re interested in doing and it’s much more likely that you’re doing them a favor. Not the other way around.
But I’ve got to get those pictures up on the internet, where she can get to them, now. There’s no point in proving that one is capable of being completely unprofessional. It might give people the wrong idea.
Video is one of those things that always seems like a good idea… Until you actually have to edit it down and make it all presentable by the deadline. It becomes doubly so as I find that my best video editing happens between the hours of about 2 AM and 6 AM.
Sometimes it has been about preference. During my senior project1 in high school, the editing portion of the project, roughly the last third to last half, was done on a schedule that involved waking up at about noon or 1 PM, going in to school to meet with my adviser and talk to people, and then coming home, eating dinner, and then working at my desk til 6 AM, when the sun came up.
On the other hand, during the process of editing the UMass Model UN conference videos2, I burned the midnight oil out of necessity. I was taking pictures during the day at the conference, and at the social events, and then editing furiously when I got back to my hotel room.
I just finished a project for my Intro to Multimedia Journalism class. I did two short video interviews which I cut down to size to add a little flavor to my feature. The whole thing can be seen here, but in many ways, it is the video work I am most proud of.
Dan Miller is a graduate fellow at the NCSC. He talked about how he became involved with the center, the research he’s doing for weather projections, and the things he likes best about the NCSC.
Some of that pride is due to practice. I have more experience asking people questions and getting them to settle in front of the camera and then working to smooth out the stutters in the story telling, rearrange clips for effect, and build a narrative that pushes toward some overall effect.
I am still learning how to do that with print.
I also can’t ignore the part of film that is more rewarding. There’s a power to the moving image that gets to people. Trying to convince someone to sit down and read your article is an exercise in futility, much of the time. It usually ends in a dispiriting amount of criticism, which one has to accept gracefully and remember to apply in the future.
Cinema makes children of us all. The magic of watching another human being talk and emote, even from a hundred miles away, to hear their voice and know, in that moment, that they’re talking to you… It’s enchanting in a way that is wholly removed from the critical analysis that print inspires.
Incidentally, that very success, the enchantment, the romance of film is what makes me hate TV news. It lends itself so easily to partisanship, making it so easy to pull people along without them even realizing.
I want to find a way to escape the thrall of film. There has to be a way to marry the analysis of print with the emotion and passion of film and image.
I guess that magic is HTML5.
1 Back to PostMemories of the War: I made a short documentary (with the available resources, so please realize that these people are kids who went to private school) about what it’s been like growing up in the shadow of 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was 10 years after the fact, and Osama Bin Laden had just been killed right as I was settling into the project.
2 Back to Post I don’t have the video for this hosted anywhere, as the conference is for high schoolers, and all the video photo work was contained within the conference, and then distributed to the chaperones. It was one of the most hectic, stressful things I’ve ever done, and I’m hoping they invite me back again this year.
I still haven’t solved the problem of how to present graffiti. But I’m trying my hand at the first step: collecting all my data in one place.
At the moment, my formal organizational system is in the form of “sets” on Flickr. I made a collection that contains all the sets I’ve made of my ever-expanding collection of photos of graffiti. I still need to get some of the pictures I’ve taken on my phone around both Providence and Amherst/Boston, and marshal them into order. But for now, you have a curated collection of street art from Athens (Summer and Winter of ’09, then Summer ’12 and ’13), London, and a small one from Montreal.
But the predominant struggle here is one of How to Write About Art. Continue reading →
Coggeshall Farm in Bristol RI hosts the Fiber Festival every year.
When shearing sheep, you wear special shoes to keep from injuring them.
A sheep will not struggle if it feels like it has no chance of righting itself, so it’s a delicate process to keep the sheep feeling immobilized.
how it comes off the sheep.
Spinning the wool off the sheep into yarn…
… That yarn is being used to weave a shawl for a raffle.
The most familiar form.
These turkeys made the most excellent noise.
They had such fascinating colors.
The Fiber Festival takes place every year in Bristol, RI, in May. The farm has horses and a donkey. Coggeshall Farm, that hosts the Festival, is also a museum. It stands as a reconstruction of a farm from the turn of the 18th century.
desert | ƨiƨɒo 