Photojournalism From A Student’s Eye

Below is a tentative schedule for the upcoming local day of the flying short course at SJSU on October 27th. We are still working on some last minute details in regards to the break-out sessions and so this may be subject to some change:

9:00 - 9:30: Coffee/Breakfast

9:30 - 10:00: Introductions (Begin Silent Auction)
10:00 - 10:30: Open Mic
10:30 - 12:00: Oakland Tribune: Not Just A Number

12:00 - 1:00: Lunch

1:00 - 5:00: Break-Out Groups featuring:

Richard Koci-Hernandez: Establishing a multimedia presence at your newspaper
Dai Sugano / Gary Reyes: Video gathering and editing techniques
Audio: Audio gathering and editing techniques
Vuvox: Jim Lanahan and Dane Howard
Kevin German: Portrait Column @ Sac Bee and location lighting
Gary Fong: Sell yourself and your work: How to become a successful freelance photographer
Latest Gear/Software from: Adobe, Apple, Canon, Nikon

1:00 - 1:50: Apple, Richard Koci-Hernandez, Audio I (Gathering Audio), Gary Fong
2:00 - 2:50: Adobe, Dai/Gary I (Gathering Video), Vuvox, Gary Fong

2:50 - 3:10: Short Break

3:10 - 4:00: Canon, Audio II (Editing Audio), Kevin German, Vuvox
4:10 - 5:10: Nikon, Dai/Gary II (Editing Video), Richard Koci-Hernandez, Kevin German

5:10 - 7: BBQ

7:00 - until: (Close of Print Auction) Portfolio Reviews

When last I wrote about San Jose State University, we were in the midst of a spring break trip to New York, Dr. Cheers had just been named the summer 2007 National Geographic faculty fellow, SJSU students were planning on helping out with the POYi awards, and Lauren, myself and Yvonne just accepted internships while Shaminder, Diana and Hanna were in the midst of theirs (I forgot to publish that post).

Since then the students and faculty at SJSU have been keeping the ball rolling. Journalism student Kyle Hansen just accepted an internship at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive. He will be working with Rob Curley on hyper-local sites and other online projects.

San Jose State will also be hosting the west coast installment of the NPPA Flying Short Course. We have been planning a variety of speakers, workshops and other events and will have everything together in time for the October 27-28 weekend. If you have any suggestions for what you would like to see feel free to drop me an email.

Lastly, something that has been in the works for some time now has finally been approved. The San Jose State photojournalism department will be holding multimedia workshops during the two summer sessions each year. Each session will be three weeks and will take place in a foreign country. The kicker, as if working on stories abroad was not enough, is that our school has two partners in this project. The Mercury News and National Geographic will each be sending either a photographer or an editor for one week to assist students as they learn multimedia storytelling techniques.

Thank you Ryan for the appropriate post title.

Click to Play

My intepretation of the SJSU NPPA Capitola Shootout held on Saturday, March 10, 2007. It was put together in Final Cut using stills from my camera and sound gathered with an Edirol R-09.

SJSU NPPA is holding an Alphabet Hunt photo competition on our flickr group page. Everyone is welcome to participate, just take a picture of something that looks like the letter for the day.

You have until midnight to upload today’s (02.23.07) letter; C.

Many thanks to Shmuel Thaler, Nhat Meyer, Paul Sakuma and Norbert von der Groeben for making it out to our discussion on ethics in the digital darkroom. The talk seemed to bring up some key points that are either subjective in nature or have yet to be answered. Differences in opinion seemed to sprout up when comparing those who work at a large publication or for a newswire with those who work in smaller market papers.

When working for a large paper or a newswire, the staff exists to post-process images for you and/or little post processing is done because the photographer does not know where the photograph will end up. In the case of a photographer working at a smaller paper, that photographer is aware of any subtleties that may exist in printing for that particular paper. He/she can adjust tones to compensate for uncalibrated monitors, poor presses, cheap paper, etc.

A few interesting suggestions came up, including a system to either track changes made to an image throughout its “life,” the embedding of a thumbnail of the raw file within the photograph’s data, and a scaled back version of photoshop that would limit the ease in which photographs can be manipulated and more closely simulate wet darkroom characteristics.

In the end, it seemed like both sides were striving for the same goal; to present to their viewers an honest a truthful view of reality. Whether that reality is what is seen by the eye of the photographer or what can be captured by a digital sensor remains a question.