Pomp and Circumstance
Today I shot the UT Medical School graduation, a combination of the 6 different colleges. After about an hour of sitting still Sarah Bing (above) couldn’t take sitting still much longer, so she lifted her eyes toward heaven and prayed for it to end soon. Her mom was graduating from the college of pharmacy so Sarah had to sit on the floor with her.
And yet it still went on and on and on….
I think I like the top one better.
The college of Dentistry got a little bubble happy.
I just liked all the colors in that one. I feel like it needs something else though.
I’ve been learning a lot lately about how to really work a situation. I’ve discovered that one of my biggest flaws as a photojournalist is my inability to commit to a photo. I’ll see a picture, and then see another and move on without really working the first one to make a good photograph. So in the end I have a lot of mediocre pictures with underdeveloped ideas behind them.
So that was my lesson-personal goal of the week. Pick your picture, commit to it, and work it til you get it.
Feature Fun
Yesterday and today I went hunting for features. The staff at the Commercial Appeal is as a whole, incredible at feature hunting. Every time they come back I think “Now where the heck did you find that and how?!” and I get inspired and then I go out myself and start to get frustrated when I get nothing. But I’ve definitly been learning a lot, a lot about knowing when to be patient and wait, and when to just keep cruising for something else. Heres two frames from my own feature hunt:
Watching Basketball Camp from the sidelines.
Family fun throwing rocks into the Mississippi River.
PANDA-monium!
Note all photos Copyright the Commercial Appeal.
Yesterday was Memorial Day and in honor of the upcoming release of Pixar’s “Kung Fu Panda” the Memphis Zoo had a local Shaolin School come and do a presentation.
Sascha practices her Kung Fu moves on a panda punching bag.
This last one is a barn owl that a zoo keep was showing some kids, I got to the Panda-monium thing early and had some time to kill.
Fly high, free bird.
Today for me, was Christmas in May.
When the photo editor called me and said, “I have a really cool assignment for you, but there’s a catch, you can’t be afraid to fly.” Afraid to fly?! I almost peed my pants I was so excited.
These are Copyright the Commercial Appeal. Hands off.
This is Skip Stewart, top 5 in the World’s best stunt pilots. Alongside a pilot from Florida, and a pilot from California, He will be performing a series of air formation stunts in Memphis tomorrow during a festival. Today during their trail run I got to shoot it; from the air.
Shooting from a plane is harder than it sounds. A lot because you can’t really move your positioning to change the angle, or whats in you frame. However this was definitly one of the funnest things I’ve done in Memphis so far. Actually, it was the absolute funnest thing. These are the kind of assignments that you think about while shooting mugshots and shooting speeches for 4 hours.
And this lovely man let me fly back home.
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