Photojournal: April 26

Well, I shot some more bands this week for my art project, and I also shot several assignments for the schools creative services project. I documented the rehearsals for a concert collaberation between the universities theatre department, 10 alumni, and the local philharmonic orchestra. I also shot some photos of a climbing wall the campus Outdoor club brought in on friday. For now, I have some photos of the bands, Death by Space Laser and Streets of Simon Lee (both on myspace, you should check them out), and the rock wall. I still have to organize the concert shots, and will try to get a few up here. As a side note,the band shots are in black and white because I was trying out a new photoshop plug-in that simulates various film-stocks. These photos are supposed to replicate Tri-X, with some added contrast for fun.







The first two photos are of Darby Hewitt (and his hands), guitar player for Death by Space Laser. The third is the hands of Dylan Wands, drummer for the band. You can visit the bands myspace page here:

Death by Space Laser

These are of the drummer, Benjamin Fikes, and bass player, Blake Earnhart, of another local band named Streets of Simon Lee. You can link to the here:

Streets of Simon Lee

Both bands were very good, and I enjoyed the show. I hope you will visit their site and check them out.




These last two are actually from the band I shot last week, named Guiaconda (sp?). I liked them in black and white so I figured I would repost them and see what others thought. I did not get any more info on the band so I cannot provide a link or names right now.






I figured I would add this at the end if anyone (anyone?, anyone? anyone?) actually reads this. I am tired. I think that I am getting so caught up in the end of the semester crunch that it is affecting my work. I haven't felt particularly strong about anything I have shot lately, and I can see it when I look at my photos.
I did shoot some video of a track meet in a town a couple of hours away. I feel like I have some stuff I can work with, but again I don't feel to strongly about it or can't get excited about working on it. Even at the meet, I really missed my family (at this point I had only seen my children a few hours in the last 3 days) and wanted to be home rather than two hours away getting sunburnt (again) and struggling with video/audio issues. This job is hard on relationships and families. Talking to a local professional only backed that up, he gave me some good advice, but could only confirm for me that the road ahead will be rocky. I am thankful I have such a supportive and loving wife; however that doesn't take away the feeling I have everytime I leave the house and my daughter cries and holds her arms out for me. I have seen that too much lately. I am not sure if this blog is the place to put all this but I need to vent somewhere.

Photojournal: April 19

Well, this week I shot some photos at the opening of our newly renovated Library, the central area of which is now called the Learning Commons. It has a genuine Starbucks, and pleny of tables and computers for group activities. Here is one of the photos I personally liked the most, of a girl picking out her free drink sample (everyone who came within a certain time on the first day got one).



Here are some photos of a couple of local bands that played at a small park pavilion. As the evening went on the light situation went from bad to terribly, horribly, hopelessly dark.There was one lamp slightly to the right of the stage, a halogen lamp I believe, so I used my flash as my main light. In order to keep things creative I tried some second curtain sync shots while I panned the camera slightly.











I also tried one 2 second exposure while using the multi-strobe mode on my flash (a canon 580 EX by the way)

On a seperate note...

I have an internship for this summer. I will be working at the Odessa American, in Odessa, Texas. I am pretty excited about this, and am looking forward to twelve weeks of working as a photojournalist at a daily paper. The photo editor there told me I will be working on a couple of projects aside from daily work and at least on of them will be self-assigned so I plan to keep this blog updated with daily work and some photo stories.

Photojournal: April 12

Well, I keep telling myself I will update this blog more than once a week but every week I only have one post. I will try to post more work here during the week as I shoot it so that some things will be more timely. Things have been so busy lately, but last week I went with my schools journalism department to the Texas Intercollegiate Press Association contest/seminar in San Antonio. I had a good time and got to hang out with people I am usually not around very much. I competed in two live photo contest taking photographs downtown along the Riverwalk, but didn't win either one. My friend Brian Schmidt, whose blog you can link to on the right, placed third in News photography and first in Sports so I was happy for him. I strongly recommend checking out Brian's blog as well as my other classmates, there is a wide variety of styles and interests in our group. Here are some photos I took while I was there, a couple are from the contest.

Photojournal: April 5

This Saturday I covered a track meet at our school, the Olver Jackson Open. It is a smaller meet, but many of the athletes are trying to qualify for nationals, so there is always the possiblity for some great performances. Here are some of my favorite shots from the day.