Tuesday, November 27, 2007

My Favorite Multimedia Piece

http://denver.rockymountainnews.com/news/finalSalute/

I like it because it's a very personal story that is broken into several pieces and is interactive. It's very moving and touching. The photos were POYi winners as well. The photographer is from the Rocky Mountain News in Denver.

http://www.roanoke.com/multimedia/crooked/interactive.html

This is a Seth Gitner piece from the Roanoke Times. I love the interactiveness of this piece and his use of flash and integrating so many different elements.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Blending, Balancing and Pop Flash

Here's what I came up with this week. This one is balancing.



Caption:
Sarah Minton, 24, (right) and Jessica Nesselhauf, 25, man the bake station table in Middlebush Hall on MU’s campus. They are part of the Association of MPA Students that is working to raise money for a program called Shop with a Cop. The program is trying to raise about $1,000 so that ten elementary school children from Columbia’s Field Elementary School can go shopping this holiday season for themselves and their families with a local law enforcement officer. The children in most cases will be low income and may have a family member incarcerated. According to Minton and Nesselhauf, the idea is to show the kids that the cops aren’t the bad guys and they still care about their families and the community they live in.

Critique:
For my select I chose one of the balancing photos. I was out wandering and went into Middlebush Hall where I found these two girls sitting at a bake sale table. So I asked if I could take their picture and then found out what they were doing there and that turned out to be really interesting after I was done shooting. When I approached the situation, I just saw interesting light, not interesting content. However, I can get a solid caption out of this and realistically could go find them and make a holiday story out of it. However, technique first. I balanced it with the light from the outside. I did have a big problem with lens flare. I saw it, and I was having trouble avoiding it and moving around it since I don’t have a hood. I shot this at ISO 200, f/10, and 1/160. I didn’t gel my flash, and I used ETTL at full power for some of them and stopped down 1/3 to 2/3’s on others. I think this one was at full power because I was a little further away from the face that needed to be lit.
I really liked the technique but I was really caught up on content. I liked working with the blending and pop flash a lot more. It’s more fun to be creative with things like that than just filling, but I know that the filling and balancing is going to get me further in life and be used more. Some of the soccer and volleyball photos were not done correctly because my flash decided to die on me and I didn’t realize it, so I had to shuffle some batteries to make it happen.


Here's another one that I liked and I'll consider it more of a pop flash or maybe even some panning. I liked it. It's down at the Rec Center where some guys were shooting some basketball before I was going to play volleyball.

Monday, November 5, 2007

Color Correction

For this assignment, we had to use different settings in white balance and with our flashes. This was my first time gelling a flash. We used a green gel to balance with Fluorescent light and an orange gel to balance with tungsten light.

This was my select:


Caption: Vanessa Riperenger, 23, holds her 8 month old son, Trent, on his first Halloween. She balances Trent with her boyfriend, working 2 jobs, and is seen talking with her mom on the phone in this photo before heading out to trick or treat.

Technical Info: Flash on manual with orange gel, full power, bounced off of white cieling with white card pulled on flash. ISO 400, f/11, 1/125

This was a RAW photo from my tungsten take and so when I color corrected, I had to add blue so that the photo didn't look orange. And it turned out really nice. I love shooting in RAW for the color correction part of it, but as far as space saving tools and convenience, I think that I will have to stick with JPEG's. I do like the power it gives you, but, it's a toss up. Very give and take in my mind. I know for me I have a lot of trouble getting photos to people if I'm shooting in RAW because they can't read the files, and then it takes forever on a large shoot to get everything over to JPEGS for people to read. So that's what I have to say about it. I liked looking at the color changes and how things were altered in my take as I went along shooting.