Visiting Front Page Africa

Day 3

It was a day of relaxation. (sort of) We woke up around 11 and got ready to go out. We walked to a hotel and had some food from there. I had a kebab and it was different from the kebabs in Germany and Austria. Jess had hummus and it might be the best hummus I've ever had. I also had mango juice and Ken and Jess had this Lebanese coffee or something like that. apparently it was really good.

This is our new kitten friend. we take turns tossing him french fries. So sweet!

We hung out there for about an hour and a half until we found out they don't have internet. So we walked over to Dona Maria's, the pizza and ice cream shop.

We did some research on the journalists and picked people we will be following around and getting more of their story. I have Mae who is incredibly famous in Liberia. She's had to go into hiding a few times because of the controversy of her stories. We had "ice cream" at Dona Marias, but it looked like gelato and it tasted like the most fake strawberry thing I've ever had. like a lip balm and ice cream mixed together.

At around 5 we left to go to Front Page Africa and meet people and take a look around.

We met Rodney Sieh and Wade Williams, another journalist. We got to see the printing presses and shake hands with a lot of people who work there. We got an idea of what their days are like by talking to Wade. She's an awesome and inspiring woman who raises two daughters and works 10-14 hours a day a few days a week. She likes to do stories on governmental issues. Rodney has gone to jail a few times for various stories as well. Both are really inspiring.

After we stood and talked to them for a few hours, we left and stopped at a place for some food. They got my order wrong, so I'm not sure what I ate but it was chicken and potatoes and garlic wrapped up. it was delicious. We ate with David, our driver. Dinner discussions ranged from religion to New Narratives. This is a really good, insightful group that I'm with. After we got back to the hotel we went through our audio gear and tried to figure things out and synchronize everything.

Fingers crossed I don't screw up the audio. I'm a year ahead of the other two in school despite me being younger, so I definitely feel like it's on my shoulders.

We have stereo mics, zoom h4ns, lav mics, and a shotgun mic. We have the stuff, we just have little to none training. So I guess we'll see how everything goes.

Shoot More!

This semester has flown by. I can't get over the fact that there are only two weeks of class left. I have been working my butt off these last few days to really do as much as I can so I'm not having 15 panic attacks a week like last semester. The problem is, there's too much to do. Video work, another video, photos to edit, photos to shoot, events to go to and shoot, flash to learn, create, and code. On top of all of this, I'm working for my professor from last semester getting ready for a Multimedia Immersion Seminar. I also meet with countless teachers, students, and nonprofit people. In short, life is crazy. In one of these meetings, I got my professor to look at some of my photos so he might see why my photos weren't coming to life last year in my one class. He took a look at them and concluded that I was shooting or at least choosing the photos based on what my professor would want. So my assignment for the last few days has been to go out and take 15 minutes at a time and do a little surprise shoot. Shoot everything. Flowers that catch the sunlight in the morning, shoot at least 100 photos of a person and figure out the features of them that make them unique and beautiful and captivating. My professor is always very inspiring so I left the meeting with high hopes that I might go back to the simple beauties I used to capture before I got buried in the avalanche of school work.

I still haven't taken enough time to be shooting (partly because this professor gave another assignment which is taking up all my time) but I really hope to keep doing what he says. Always keep shooting. It's hard to when life is in the way and you have 38896 things to think about, but I know I have to do this to one day be great.

It takes 10000 hours to become a master at something. That's only 2.7 hours a day for 10 years. Is that all? Ha. At least I'm on my way.

Here's a few photos that caught my eye. They are a little boring, I promise to take more dynamic photos in the future. Enjoy for now.

-K

Vintage photos

It's been pretty crazy lately in school, plus Easter just happened and I got to go home and see some family, which was pretty amazing. I wanted to talk a little about vintage photos and over-editing. Now I am a person who has been immersed in photoshop for a good five years. So I know some really cool things and I'm actually learning a lot more things at Newhouse. For one assignment we have to design a workbook whether it's for a specific company or a made up one. The topic is anything we choose. My partner, Ashley, is really into vintage things and old photo frames. I really loved the idea, plus I can get inspired on pinterest or flickr.

So I took some photos of a girl I went to high school with, Caitlin. She had brought a lot of different clothes to choose from and even had a dress that emulated the 1800's. I took photos of her in the studio for almost 8 hours straight and it was playing with the lighting on her. It was also nice to see an old friend and meet her little dog, Harvey.

After I took these photos, I edited them fixing her hair and her skin a little, and then posted those on facebook. After  two weeks, I finally found a tutorial on how to make photos look vintage. I tried it out and really liked it.

http://veerle-v2.duoh.com/blog/comments/photoshop_vintage_effect/

Here it is, if anyone wanted to try it. I think the photos change a lot, and I think for this project, it works. However, I got a lot of comments on how the vintage effect really took away from her blue eyes. I'm still not sure I would choose to do this to a normal photo of mine, but for a project, or to go with a theme, I kind of liked how these came out. Thoughts?

This weekend should be vintage still lifes to finish up the project. Excited to try some different lighting techniques that I learned last semester.

For now, I should get some sleep. I haven't slept since Monday night! Crazy grad school.