Lighthouse Photojournalism

Hi, I'm Sean S, a journalist student & photographer at Wayne State University. Welcome to The Blog.

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Sunny Home on a foggy day; West Grand Boulevard and McGraw are now somewhat less illustrious than the name may suggest, as urban decay has seized ahold in westside neighborhoods more than others. (at Mc Graw/w Grand Boulevard)

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Today's Misadventures took me to ... Macomb Mall! I can't say much for how interesting it was (honestly, it wasn't), but the ride back into Detroit along the lakeshore on the 615 Jefferson is lovely in its own right. Even if it's just as background for reading :3 (at St. Clair Shores, Michigan)

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To Impeach or Not to Impeach--THAT is the Question: an Opinionated Editorial

So. Here we are, 11 months into the presidency of a reality TV star. Is everything where we all predicted it’d be last year, in the lead up to the bitter election? Let’s evaluate a list of eventful happenings, and decide.

Trump’s administration strips workplace protections for vulnerable trans employees and advocates actively against them

Via a series of continuous and ongoing Twitter rants and feuds, the commander-in-chief brought the United States to the border of nuclear war with the similarly volatile-headed North Korea, Iran, and shaken relations with potentially dangerous allies (China, Mexico and Saudi Arabia spring to mind)

Protected and obfuscated allies allegedly interlinked with a mind-boggling series of Russia-related scandals (election interference, obstruction of justice, gross incompetence, collusion, conspiracy to commit treason)

Destroying health care and tax reform, potentially leaving millions in the dust with no medical care and higher tax rates to the sole benefit of mega-corporations and the 1%

Harassing and threatening the NFL and its football players for exercising free speech and right to peaceful protest

Honestly, the list goes on and on, and the more I write about it, the more dispiriting the cumulative effect of living under the dangling Sword of Damocles becomes. Few can argue (though some will try) that the least popular first-term president in modern history is doing a great job, and plenty HAVE argued that Trump is worth bringing impeachment proceedings against. But is that the best option?

WELL ... it’d be incredibly satisfying, for one. Witnessing a braggart bully brought back to the bench is the kind of catharsis a defeated party like the Democrats would be revitalized by. Taking political power out of the tiny orange hands of a compulsively-lying narcissist, and removing the political backing from his rampant Twitter account in the process, has the potential to prevent international catastrophe! But is this better, considering what lies in wait behind the scenes?

Under the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, upon the removal or resignation of a president, the next person in line for the seat of power is the vice president, currently held by former Indiana governor and part-time Bond villain Mike Pence. Pence, a demon cloaked in the flesh of a human being, advocates for “conversion therapy” (repeated electrocution and psychological reprogramming) of LGBT folks, pushed the incredibly divisive transgender “bathroom bill” through the state legislature in 2015 allowing businesses to openly discriminate against LGBT individuals based on “religious objection” (which can mean anything they want). The vice president hit more than just “the gays”: he restricted women’s reproductive rights, denied reasonable FOIA requests and withheld documents, defunded needle exchanges and medical treatment clinics that combat infectious diseases, stripped funding from renewable energy, encouraged guns be brought into schools (for “personal protection”), sought to shift funding from woefully undersupplied public schools to underregulated charter schools ... but all of this, while appearing to be a reasonable and even keeled man.

The most dangerous foe is one who looks like a friend, and while Trump is a clown and a loud mouth, he’s visible and plainspoken. Pence is insidious. Should a Trump impeachment come to pass, the resulting Pence presidency could harm more of America than we’d ever imagine.

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Thoughts on Bookstores and the Decline of Western Civilization: an Opinionated Editorial

A classic line heard regularly from bibliophiles around the country, the lamentation “oh, no, ‘x’ bookstore is closing! what a world! nobody reads anymore!” Which, sure, there’s a kernel of truth to that: books, particularly hardcover editions, tend to be prohibitively expensive, with each copy running upwards of $25 apiece, and even paperbacks (mass market editions or trade paperbacks) can run from $8 to $20 or higher, and sticker shock can scare away even the most voracious of readers. If elder generations are to be believed, then the modern day youth are so fixated on gaming, staring blankly at their smartphones, sexting and destroying western civilization with emoticons that nobody seems to have the time to pick up literature! Which, somehow, is leading to moral decay and excess of the entire Millennial generation.

Anyway.

Bookstores are lovely places--few in the world are willing to deny the simple pleasures of wandering the stacks, lovingly organized, sipping coffee from the inevitable attached cafe, goggle-eyed over the latest bestsellers and genre hits. But to say that the two are attached, that kids of the modern day are deliberately abstaining from perusing and purchasing from bookstores because of the allure of technology, is rather misleading. Literacy and average amounts read by youth and teens are estimated as higher now than at any other time, less in print books but higher in overall words: with the internet at easy finger’s reach, the students who would likely never pick up another book after the moment they graduate now have dense information to read available through Twitter, through Facebook, news aggregators (hard news, features, even “trashy” tabloid-esque websites like TMZ). THOUSANDS of words and stories, fanfiction, rumors, all of it contributes to ongoing learning and literacy in young adults--in such a way that DOESN’T bankrupt you. Public libraries, another source of affordable literature, aren’t (unfortunately) able to maintain pace with the progression of technology--ebooks and video streaming, two wildly popular programs both valued by the public at large today, are often only reluctantly offered by the larger urban libraries who can afford them.

The looming juggernaut, Amazon (originally born as an online book vendor in the 1990s), is another culprit of the demise of the bookstore. Detroit’s Wayne State University offers print and text books, as well as a generous constellation of university paraphernalia, at very often astounding markups. The Barnes and Noble-sold print copy of Media & Culture, 10th Edition (a text for journalism and communications majors) starts at $106.05; the Amazon.com price for the same edition, same used copy? $19. The price gouging in effect for ANYTHING you care to search in a bookstore, compared to Amazon and other vendors, is hurting the industry. Part of this is reflected in necessitated markups: in order to maintain a respectable profit margin, books have to be sold above cost. Amazon doesn’t have that self-regulating responsibility, only needing to make pennies on each dollar to keep the megalith afloat. Look at that and consider: technology, rather than simple morality or whatever you’d prefer to call it, is the driving force, ahem, driving bookstores out of business.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an overpriced latte to drink while forlornly browsing all these books I can’t afford.

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Regional Transit Relic - an Opinionated Editorial

The original title of this article, percolating around in the back of my brain, had been a grandiose and condemnatory one: “SMART must be destroyed.” The phrase is a callback to Roman politician Cato the Elder, who emphatically derided the juggernaut city-state Carthage as a menace to “civilized society” and urged the Roman Senate to raze it to the ground, as a barren patch of dirt, he felt, would be a better use than a rival city-state that threatened the Republic.

SMART, until perhaps two weeks ago, was in my eyes a similar obstacle to prosperity. SMART is the acronym for “Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation,” the public bus network in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties ... most of them, anyhow. Under a provision left in place from SMART’s predecessor organization (SEMTA, “Southeastern Michigan Transit Authority,” which collapsed under decades of mismanagement and under-funding), local governments--cities and townships in Oakland and Wayne counties, and the entirety of Macomb county--must opt in by popular vote to supply funding via millage, and in turn receive bus service. All of Macomb county participates, but the spread of communities in the other two have the option to withdraw; All of western Wayne county west of Westland and south of Romulus, and all of north and east Oakland county decline to support the SMART network (ostensibly to keep crime out of their glorious shimmering communities, or whatever they tell themselves to sleep better at night, but typically it correlates directly to income disparity between wealthy suburbs and blisteringly poor, minority-heavy Detroit and satellite suburbs).

Sure, Bloomfield Hills can maintain its image as exclusive country clubs and lovingly preened gardens for the Upper Class™, but every route that formerly passed through it was destroyed. Livonia withdrew citing inadequate service to its residents in 2005, and non-resident riders are stranded on the outskirts of the city. Novi is just about as easy to reach as the moon without a car, Plymouth is almost an hour’s bike ride from the nearest bus stop, and a constellation of upscale communities in Oakland are blots on the map.

Detroit itself possesses a tangled network of bus lines, operated by the Detroit Department of Transportation (DDoT), and for years restricted SMART’s ability to freely enter and exit city limits, only allowing drop-offs inbound to downtown and pickups outbound during the 3-hour peak service on weekday mornings and evenings. Riders, hamstrung, languish sometimes for hours at the borders of the city, hoping to reach home before their particular route ends for the night.

DDoT recently made massive improvements to its own network, reactivating 24-hour service on the nine highest-trafficked crosstown and downtown routes and implementing express services. The Regional Transit Authority (RTA), an oversight collaborative group working to meld SMART and DDoT together, began three all-day service express buses last September on Gratiot and Woodward in hopes of bribing voters into supporting a millage (they ultimately, slimly failed). And as online juggernaut Amazon seeks a city with low property taxes, affordable housing, plentiful education and a youthful workforce to house their east American headquarters, their final demand goes largely unmet: effective public transit. SMART, panicking to meet this demand, says their newly announced Regional Express services--tripling the number of buses running all-day, no boarding restrictions inside or outside Detroit and covering new main streets--fixes the issues of the past ... regarding the city only. Under-funding, mismanagement, decaying buses, and patchwork service remain, even in supportive participant cities, regardless of a good first step.

SMART must be destroyed, and give space to something--anything--that can redeem Detroit in the eyes of its peers. If we have a stellar network like Chicago one day, then we’ll be talking.

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Batch 1 of 2, photos I took at Greenfield Village for my final assignment in photojournalism class!

1: A historic presenter, clad in a 19th century bonnet and dress matching the era’s standards of propriety and carrying a parasol, crosses a wooden covered bridge in Dearborn’s Greenfield Village museum Sat., April 15.

2: A historic presenter, wearing a late 19th century suit, relaxes on a bench across the street from the Sarah Jordan Boarding House, one of the first private homes in the world to have electricity, in Dearborn’s Greenfield Village museum Sat., April 15.

3: One of Greenfield Village’s fleet of antique cars, an authentic Ford Model T, chauffeurs guests through the Dearborn museum complex Sat., April 15. Model T cars were Ford Motor Company’s best-selling vehicle for two decades, and stand as one of the ten best-selling vehicles of all time.

4: Gilt finish gleams on statues installed above the doorway into Greenfield Village’s Sir John Bennett Sweet Shop, in Dearborn, Mich. The statues, automated to ring the clock tower bells above the door every quarter hour, were part of the original London building after which the Greenfield Village replica was modeled in 1931.

5: A print shop historical presenter demonstrates to a small crowd the traditional small-scale process of printing press operations, in Dearborn’s Greenfield Village, Sat., April 15.

6: Replica glassware and laboratory equipment sits on shelves and tables inside Greenfield Village’s replica of Menlo Park, in Dearborn, Sat., April 15. The laboratory was modeled to exact specifications off the original New Jersey complex during its construction in 1931; Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were close friends and mutual admirers in their time, which allowed Ford unparalleled access to Edison’s development centers.

7: Horses await idly as riders and coach operators prepare to board a stagecoach at Greenfield Village’s stables, in Dearborn, Sat., April 15.

8: Throngs of museum visitors crowd onto the Greenfield Village steamtrain at the park entrance station, in Dearborn, Sat., April 15. The train tracks run in a two mile loop around the borders of the complex, and brush against the Dearborn Amtrak station, the Henry Ford indoor museum, and the Henry Ford Academy, a private school on the grounds.

9: A Model T Touring car drives past the Luther Burbank house in Greenfield Village, an outdoor museum complex in Dearborn, Sat., April 15. Burbank, a botanist and horticulturist, developed the Russett potato strain (among other agricultural innovations), the most widely-used variety of potato in the world.

10: Visitors linger around the fountain at the entryway to the Greenfield Village museum complex in Dearborn, Mich., on April 15. Greenfield Village is closed, except for special events, between late November and early April every year due to Michigan’s intemperate weather, and its reopening weekend draws large crowds of visitors to the park.

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My final project this semester for photojournalism class: photographs from the opening day at Greenfield Village! The interviews present were conducted a week afterward, once the insane crowds frothing for a visit to the open-air museum calmed down, and I met some fun people those days.

This video, essentially an animated slideshow set to dialogue, was cobbled together on Lightworks, a mostly free video editing software program I was advised to work with by a geologist friend of mine at Wayne State. I’ll post the individual photos in two sets later tonight, along with an accompanying essay, but the most IMPORTANT element is the video! It was all one heck of a ride, though, let me tell you.

(I apologize for not putting more captions and transitions in the video--Lightworks was easier for me to handle than Adobe Premiere, but even it was driving me crazy towards the end of this project. For the record, I spoke to a security guard who works for The Henry Ford, and the grassy door is apparently a direct passage from the museum complex into the Fair Lane estates--Henry Ford’s private mansion a mile away!)

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Portraiture and the art of direction: a photography essay

This was such a strange topic to cover, compared to my other shoots this semester. The nature of photojournalism (and, honestly, regular journalism to a degree) itself is largely rooted in candid photography: hanging alongside the action, taking photos and angling so as not to be obnoxious, hedging and striving to be part of the background as a top priority, a recorder but not a player.

Portraits are a separate ballpark entirely.

The process of establishing a shoot for portraiture is in diametric opposition to what journalism typically strives for, and is more in line with classical photo methods: the subject (in the case I dealt with last week, the very gracious Ms. Sharon Mayweathers) is fully aware of the photographer’s presence, may be receptive to direction, and usually stares down the photographer to some degree with a piercing or knowing gaze. That awareness of action, and the potential of interaction between photographer and subject, adds this surreal dimension of “hey, wow, I feel like a film director” to the mix. My preferred specialty is ambient/landscape shots, so having to lean around and reangle shots while a living, breathing person is standing there holding a pose? It’s nothing like what I’ve done before (a phrase I say almost every week in this class, because it’s still true)!

Lighting was a severe frustration during my photoshoot. The most visually appealing areas in the Campbell Branch Library, to my eye, were in the center of the building, turned away from the library patrons congregating at the circulation and reference desks, and not drawing undue background participants on the internet computers... which left us mainly with the street and windows as backgrounds.

(the mural, also interesting to look at, would’ve overwhelmed the scene, I think)

The trouble with the windows as a backdrop meant that half my photos were slightly washed out from the glare (but Ms. Mayweathers was captured more visibly), and the other half, once compensated for reciprocity, had the windows and books more evenly lit, but Ms. Mayweathers was left shadowed. Working around her schedule kept the session from being too long, and reduced the amount of pictures and angles I took before we had to pack up and leave, but she made it work! Can’t overlook that human element, either. The headshot was thankfully uneventful, and turned out wonderful. (this one distracting thermostat made maneuvering irritating against the wall, but we got around it okay.)

Ultimately, this was strange, but a blast to work with such a new range of experiences and a friendly subject, to boot! I can see why portrait studio photographers make such a killing, after this experience--it’s more of a challenge than it looks.

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Sports action photography! Neat!

Shooting for sports was so strikingly different than working on any other assignment before or hence, for quite the gaggle of reasons. The bulk of my photos I’d had to take up until this point (the ten showcasing a host of standard photographic techniques, event coverage, random encounter “enterprise” photographs) were incidental, largely: when I was out looking for these visually interesting opportunities, the chance for the picture was based out of luck, but not NECESSARY. If the shot lined up through my viewfinder had been missed, there would be another somewhere else, and if THAT meant seeking a second event, then so be it!

With sporting events, though, any opportunity for a grand moment passes by fast as a blinking eye. Shutter speed, by virtue of the rapidfire action on-field, becomes even more vital to consider as a result. One of the biggest elements of reciprocity was that shutter speed (depth-of-field shots became impossible when that damnable chain link fence obscured so many shots, and was not only inescapable, but ruined a few pictures), as the pitch was reasonably well-lit by virtue of natural sunshine on a lovely afternoon, but intermittently overcast, so that continuous finnicking with film speed and shutter speed were absolutely vital to maintaining visual quality. (mea culpa: I botched more than a few brilliant shots due to washout or pitch blackness, and far too many because of manual focus. ugh.)

Until a classmate tipped me off beforehand, I hadn't considered the bureaucratic and courteousness elements of the equation: asking for permission ahead of time, through the administrative staff. Now, while journalistic freedoms allow (theoretically) the picture-taking of nearly anybody, plenty of schools and teams restrict press access on their private grounds, and need a vetting or approval form signed beforehand. As my feature covered the Wayne State University softball team, my prerequisite involved signing a quote-unquote “responsibility agreement.” This meant not using the players’ likenesses for advertisement, immediate financial gain or debasement, essentially, and that I wouldn’t sublet their images to any other entities. Easy enough for me, a student with only a blog and a couple social media accounts, but if I’d been a professional photographer, these could have potentially handicapped me in any licensure agreements in the future.

The most important things I learned, though? Have fun and be inventive with your hiding places, don’t be afraid to do your homework and groundwork with getting the names and ranks of the players involved, BRING SUNSCREEN OR YOU WILL BURN, and take along more than enough refreshments to sustain yourself during the two-hour-plus games. And, obviously, don’t stress too hard. In games like these, even college-level softball has plenty of photographic opportunities for a ball caught mid-throw or a crowd cheering on their favorites.

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TOP: A portrait of Sharon Mayweathers, Detroit Department of Transportation outreach coordinator, looking through books at the Detroit Campbell branch public library in the Springwells Village neighborhood of Detroit last Wednesday. DDOT held the second of three public hearings at the library Wed., April 12,to inform Detroit area residents about significant city bus service improvements and modifications due to be implemented this Saturday. “We really like holding these meetings here [in Southwest Detroit],” she said, “because we always get such a great turnout.”

BOTTOM: Sharon Mayweathers, DDOT public outreach coordinator.

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TOP: Wayne State hitter Allie Buchanan is tagged out at first by Grand Valley State's Marianne Deppe during the softball match doubleheader Sunday, at Wayne State University's Gary L. Bryce softball field in Detroit. The match, the second of two, went to Grand Valley State, a 0-4 loss for Wayne State.

MIDDLE: Courtney Reinhold, a Grand Valley State softball pitcher, cheers in the visiting team dugout during the softball match doubleheader Sunday, at Wayne State University's Gary L. Bryce softball field in Detroit. The second game, pictured, was won 0-4 by Grand Valley State, while the first was won 1-0 by home team Wayne State.

BOTTOM: Jen Rivera, assistant softball coach for Grand Valley State, high-fives a player coming onto the field during the softball match doubleheader Sunday, at Wayne State University's Gary L. Bryce softball field in Detroit.

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Feature photography, special events, and random encounters: an essay

In-depth event coverage is a surprisingly fun way to spend an afternoon, which was the first of several valuable lessons I took away from my experience covering the Activism in the Age of Trump convention back in March. You’re out there (or, as I was, in there) in the thick of it, a camera dangling from your neck, primed for shooting and eyes twitching around the room/event looking for visually striking moments to snapshot. Calculating neat-looking angles (dutch angles? high viewpoint? wide-angle or close-up?) and a depth-of-field that conveys a unique perspective are components that have to be decided in only a couple of seconds, in certain cases.

Fleshing out and testing your settings for indoor or outdoor shooting are COMPLETELY mandatory before even beginning--an issue that cropped up during my coverage was washing-out from the harsh fluorescent lights and an ISO film speed that honestly had no reason to be at 3200. Working everything out with shutter speed, aperture, focus, ISO, angling, and combining THOSE with finding people engaging in discussions or otherwise being interesting? It’s exciting to be in that moment, even when it’s at an event as day-to-day as health care and voting registration tables!

One crucial lesson I learned from this, beyond the technical components, is the vital angle that candid photos ascribe to the process of photojournalism. If your subjects have that direct awareness of your presence, they switch into “Camera Friendly” mode: that stiff, forced awkwardness when a photographer has their lens trained on you and you’re less than thrilled. One gentleman at the event I covered, from the Students for a Democratic Society, noticed me taking a picture of him and his table, and my arm was bent into telling him about my assignment. He immediately posed, and I obliged by taking a picture, but the moment was ruined--the picture by virtue of being posed was completely unusable. It happens to everyone eventually, I suppose, but the lesson learned was to snap first and follow-up afterwards. That avoids any morally questionable “photo illustration” situations...

Enterprise shots, the other part of the assignment, deal with happenstance occurrences in the real world: people running around, interacting with natural events or each other, etc., which have a quirky or cool element to them. The biggest parts to a great enterprise shot are a) wander around aimlessly until you see something cool, and b) make unequivocally sure that you’re white balanced and reciprocity-balanced for the shot BEFOREHAND. Fumbling down from a dim indoor-calibrated shot (f/5.6, 1/25 shutter speed, and 1600 ISO) to a sunny outdoor one can cost you enough time that the happening is lost forever. Be vigilant!

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Customers hurriedly enter and exit Cannoli Pastry Shop in Dearborn, Mich., March 25, 2017. The bakery, which opened in downtown West Dearborn at the beginning of February, has piqued community interest over its Italian specialty desserts, and was featured last month on Detroit’s Channel 7 News.

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TOP - Jerry White, right, speaks with a visitor at the International Youth and Students for Social Equality table Wed., March 22, 2017, at Wayne State University of Detroit, Michigan. The gathering, "Activism in the Age of Trump," was organized by the WSU chapter of the AAUP-AFT, and hosted university community organizations involved in social awareness and outreach.

MIDDLE - Native American Student Organization president Kaela Wabanimkee-Harris, right, speaks to a visiting Macomb Community College professor at Activism in the Age of Trump, Wed., March 22, 2017, at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. The event, focused on community, political and social outreach, was hosted in WSU's Student Center and drew student, professor and visitor guests.

BOTTOM - AAUP-AFT executive Tammy Force, left, and Nutrition & Food Science academic adviser Deanna Cavanaugh, right, speak together at the Voter Registration table at Activism in the Age of Trump, Wed., March 22, 2017, at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. The event, hosted by the WSU branch of the AAUP-AFT in the Student Center, focused on community outreach and awareness groups in the greater Detroit area.

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The whys (and occasionally the wherefores) of cutlines

Photojournalism, we meet again! Under more traditional circumstances, a cutline would be referred to as a “photo caption,” the descriptive text which runs underneath, alongside, above, or overlaid upon a picture in a publication; however, the landscape of newspapers and professionalized online writing dictates we need fancier terminology to match all this expertise and highfalutin’ collegiate larnin’s, so cutline it is.

Every properly-written cutline is ostensibly between one and three sentences long, and frontloads the most pressing nuggets of information in the first sentence: who is pictured, what are they doing, when did it happen, and where did it physically occur? The why, the context behind the actions or events, goes in the second sentence, to help the reader gain an understanding even if they don’t read the story. If desired, or if it’s a standalone image without a paired story to accompany, a third sentence with a quote that further fleshes out the tone can be fitted at the end.

(ex: Michael Douglas’ character William “D-FENS” Foster, center, brandishes a submachine gun in a fast food restaurant in Joel Schumacher’s 1993 dark comedy Falling Down. D-FENS, a recently fired military defense contractor, went on an unhinged rampage around Los Angeles on his way to his daughter’s birthday party. “I don’t want LUNCH, I want BREAKFAST,” D-FENS said, several minutes after the restaurant switched to the lunch menu. (c) Warner Bros.)

Now, while there’s plenty I could have put in about how ridiculous the not-a-robbery scene was, or that Douglas was also being hunted down by the LAPD during the same time, or any number of other factoids, it’d be too wordy and clutter the cutline. Making it primarily informative, secondarily interesting, and descriptive but not overly wordy are the three elements of a successful cutline. Accuracy, not ridiculing the subject or putting in insipid jokes which can get you fired, and attributing the source all count in the extreme! If you sneak in a line of joke text about “F***wit Jones” expecting the editor to catch it, and he DOESN’T, is how a newspaper recall, retraction/apology, and summary firing all happen roughly simultaneously.

The biggest element to cutlines is how vital they are to understanding. Pictures are worth a thousand words, sure, but they don’t literally SPEAK for themselves--you don’t know John Jackson from Jack Johnson in a press photo unless there’s a subtitle telling which is which, why they’re there, or why WE care as readers! Journalists, editors, and photojournalists are there to provide that context. Otherwise, it’s just two more politicians waving at a crowd.

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On Taking GOOD Pictures (and managing time properly): A Photojournalism Essay

I’ve had a lifelong fascination for photography, but never had the finances, time, or opportunity to get involved in it for nearly my entire life: until I got my first flip-phone with a camera in my senior year of high school, I’d never owned either a cell phone nor a working digital camera, and not until senior year of COLLEGE (last month) had I even had a smartphone’s camera to work with. Virtually everything in my knowledge on camera work, from good angles, perspective lines, shadows, what an “ISO” or an “f/stop” are, the meaning of “1/125″ in regards to anything or whether that was fast or slow, the different buttons that make magic happen on this Daguerre sorcery in my hands--it all came about in the last six or seven weeks!

There’s an intensely fun awkwardness involved in taking vibrant, interesting photographs, I’ve noticed during this project: obtaining a neat angle for a picture that captures the viewer’s attention, hemming in the subject while making them seem larger-than-life (if you’re lying prone on the floor aiming up at them) or smaller (if leaning precipitously overhead from a railing), snagging the right moment of motion without ruining the ambience or blatantly intruding, these in themselves are, uh, snapshots of an art form, pardon the pun. Balancing the ISO (the film’s sensitivity to light, in more traditional photographic work), the f/stop (aperture size, with 4 being wide-open and selectively focused and 32 being narrow and more encompassing), and the shutter speed (each speed being measured in fractions of a second; 1/4000 is one-four thousandths of a second, while 1″ is a solid second of time-lapse) against each other’s countervailing properties of brightness, dimness, focus, blur, and grain is delicate. Any misstep of these elements can ruin a photo, or certainly diminish it in the eyes of the beholder.

Moving beyond the elements of a picture ... would be a mea culpa, that of the procrastinator. Waiting until the last moment to take exacting, visually striking, and specific images, edit them, and post them properly along with a similarly procrastinated accompanying “what I learned today is!” synopsis ... it’s a recipe for disaster. OBVIOUSLY. Leaving all that work and diligence until the sixteenth hour, buried under a deluge of other classes’ homework, essays, studies, the predestined commute to and from school, work, sustaining a relationship and friendships--if you waste the necessary time on navel-gazing and doing nothing productive (like I did) instead of a more leisurely paced work environment and planning home- and schoolwork around life events (which I did NOT), you’ll be in trouble.

Overall, the largest and most poignant lesson I’ve taken from this class (besides learning how to operate a camera from the ground up) is that photography is harder than it looks, absolutely. It’s an art form, which is how Ansel Adams is in galleries and photojournalists can make a living in the first place!

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Ten photos of ten different photographic techniques! This is my first “big assignment” for photojournalism, and I’m rather proud of these. Each image has the photographic technique, ISO, shutter speed, and f/stop as a caption when the image is viewed full screen, but they’re also listed below for simplicity’s sake, with date and location captions.

1) Shallow Depth of Field (ISO 800, 1/125 Shutter Sp., f/3.5) - Starbucks cup at the Apple Store, Somerset Collection, March 1, 2017.

2) Wide Depth of Field (ISO 1600, 1/25 Shutter Sp., f/16) - Starbucks cup at the Apple Genius Bar, Somerset Collection, March 1, 2017.

3) Stopped Action (ISO 3200, 1/400 Shutter Sp., f/4) - Four Angels Fountain, Somerset Collection, March 1, 2017.

4) Blurred Action (ISO 400, 1/13 Shutter Sp., f/10) - Automotion at La Pita, Wayne State University, February 15. 2017.

5) Panned Action (ISO 400, 1/13 Shutter Sp., f/10) - Hurried Crossing, Wayne State University, February 15, 2017.

6) Rule of Thirds (ISO 3200, 1/250 Shutter Sp., f/5.6) - Elevated Elevator Curiosity, Somerset Collection, March 1, 2017.

7) Perspective (ISO 1600, 1/50 Shutter Sp., f/5.6) - Big Beaver Bridge, Somerset Collection, March 1, 2017.

8) Silhouette (ISO 3200, 1/15 Shutter Sp., f/5.6) - A Slight Fan of Shadows, Dearborn, February 17, 2017.

9) Extreme Lighting (ISO 1600, 1/50 Shutter Sp., f/10) - On A Bus Going Nowhere Fast, New Center, March 1, 2017.

10) Wildcard - Image Symmetry (ISO 800, 1/25 Shutter Sp., f/5.6) - My Mom’s Windowsill Figurines, Dearborn, February 17, 2017.