When the National Cherry Blossom Festival begins on Saturday, dozens of photographers will find their way to the Tidal Basin to capture it on camera. There will be tourists, eager for the perfect Washington-in-the-spring shot. And there will be professionals, serious about photographing the blossoms and their visitors.
Hundreds--if not thousands--of images will be made before the festival ends on April 13, but I've already found my favorite cherry blossom photo. (It's the ninth in the Washington Post's slide show from the 2006 festival:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/gallery/070305/GAL-07Mar05-67023/index.html.)
For me, it was love at first sight. Really, what could make a sweeter cherry blossom photo than a pair of little girls in pink flowery dresses reaching out to touch the pink flowers by the water? Read the caption, and it gets even better: The girls are 3-year-old twins.
I love that they're so absorbed in touching the blossoms that they don't notice they're being photographed, and I love that the Post's Arianne Starnes made the image with the girls on the right side of the frame instead of the center. I'm not quite sure what the photo's subject is--the girls or the cherry blossoms--and I like the fact that it could be either, or maybe both.
I only wish I took it myself.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Looking Through That Lens
I tried to see my life through a camera lens this week.
My typical day includes driving to and from campus, working in the office of a children's magazine, and eating dinner with my parents and younger siblings. These things seem so terribly ordinary that I wondered if there was any potential for a truly good photograph.
I thought that if I could get past holding the camera at eye-level and try some unusual angles, I might make a worthwhile image. So I experimented...and found that some photos I took were okay, some were bad, and some were just weird.
Next, I tried photographing events that were a bit out of the ordinary: a friend's wedding and the high school play I attended this week. There was plenty of material at the wedding, but there were also plenty of barriers to good photography. For one thing, the professional photographers got all the good spots. There was also the problem of working around so many wedding guests-- someone seemed to cross in front of me at all the wrong moments.
The play also presented special challenges. There was awful lighting in the area we waited in before entering the auditorium, and I couldn't get nearly as close as I would have liked to the stage without disturbing the performance.
Is it better to look for creative angles in an ordinary situation, or to photograph things that are naturally exciting?
I'm still not sure.
My typical day includes driving to and from campus, working in the office of a children's magazine, and eating dinner with my parents and younger siblings. These things seem so terribly ordinary that I wondered if there was any potential for a truly good photograph.
I thought that if I could get past holding the camera at eye-level and try some unusual angles, I might make a worthwhile image. So I experimented...and found that some photos I took were okay, some were bad, and some were just weird.
Next, I tried photographing events that were a bit out of the ordinary: a friend's wedding and the high school play I attended this week. There was plenty of material at the wedding, but there were also plenty of barriers to good photography. For one thing, the professional photographers got all the good spots. There was also the problem of working around so many wedding guests-- someone seemed to cross in front of me at all the wrong moments.
The play also presented special challenges. There was awful lighting in the area we waited in before entering the auditorium, and I couldn't get nearly as close as I would have liked to the stage without disturbing the performance.
Is it better to look for creative angles in an ordinary situation, or to photograph things that are naturally exciting?
I'm still not sure.
A Compelling Story? It's a Start.
"High School Confidential," a documentary that tells a dozen teenage girls' stories, premiered this week on We TV. The stories are by no means boring-- one girl talks about her anorexia, another about her cousin's death, a third about her experiences fighting a brain tumor. You'd think material like that would make for a pretty compelling show.
But in the Washington Post's review, Laura Sessions Stepp writes that "they [the girls] don't engage us, and that's not their fault. Their stories don't move us largely because of how they were shot and edited."
I wouldn't have understood this in quite the same way had I read the review a few weeks ago. But after beginning to study video journalism and filming a few short videos of my own, I know that it's possible to have a strong story but a disappointing video.
In the print world, a powerful quote is pretty much all you need. It doesn't matter whether the person had a funny look on her face when she said it, it doesn't matter if the lighting was poor during the interview, and it certainly doesn't matter if your hand wasn't perfectly steady while she was speaking.
But that just isn't the case with video.
When you produce a video, you're looking at the whole picture. Yes, you want those strong quotes. But you also want smooth footage. You want decent weather, so a serious story doesn't become ridiculous because the interview subject is getting drenched by the rain. You don't want the roaring of fire engines driving or the beeping of car horns or just about any other distraction in the background.
The extra challenges make video journalism that much harder to get a handle on. But they also make it that much more rewarding when you've done a good job.
But in the Washington Post's review, Laura Sessions Stepp writes that "they [the girls] don't engage us, and that's not their fault. Their stories don't move us largely because of how they were shot and edited."
I wouldn't have understood this in quite the same way had I read the review a few weeks ago. But after beginning to study video journalism and filming a few short videos of my own, I know that it's possible to have a strong story but a disappointing video.
In the print world, a powerful quote is pretty much all you need. It doesn't matter whether the person had a funny look on her face when she said it, it doesn't matter if the lighting was poor during the interview, and it certainly doesn't matter if your hand wasn't perfectly steady while she was speaking.
But that just isn't the case with video.
When you produce a video, you're looking at the whole picture. Yes, you want those strong quotes. But you also want smooth footage. You want decent weather, so a serious story doesn't become ridiculous because the interview subject is getting drenched by the rain. You don't want the roaring of fire engines driving or the beeping of car horns or just about any other distraction in the background.
The extra challenges make video journalism that much harder to get a handle on. But they also make it that much more rewarding when you've done a good job.
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