Daniel Sato

In between the grind of pumping out daily video at The News Journal, we also try and fit in special projects and a few video series. One such series if 50 Who Matter, which focuses on individuals throughout the state of Delaware who are working to improve their communities. The series can be hit or miss at times, depending on how soon/late they decide who they will feature. Recently though, we have had two that I think are worth sharing.

Mary Hampson

Mary Hampson was unique for many reasons, the most obvious being her age. Most of the people we feature in the 50 Who Matter series are middle-aged, but Hampson began volunteering with the Freedom Outreach program at 17, and became its director at 21. She is also unique because she works directly in areas that are often skeptical of people from outside the community. One such area is Southbridge, which we focused on during a project on poverty and crime. Mary has been more than welcomed into Southbridge and Riverside, she is practically a member of everyone’s family. She checks up on schoolwork, knows when family members are in the hospital, drives kids to and from basketball practice and bakes and delivers over 100 birthday cakes a year.

Dolores Finger Wright

Dolores Finger Wright is an associate professor of social work at Delaware State University. Back when Ms. Finger Wright was attending Bennett College in Greensboro, N.C., she helped to plan and organize the Greensboro sit-ins which were a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights movement. In speaking with her she reminded me of how different life was for her growing up as compared to the youth today, and explained how she tries to instill the same passion for social change in her students today that she had as a college student.

The video above is from the first major project I was able to work on at The News Journal. Ira Porter (how great is that name?) had been working on a story about a University of Delaware professor who was doing research in the Wilmington neighborhoods of Southbridge and the East Side. That quickly expanded to a larger story on what residents thought of their communities and the efforts to bring change into them.

Eventually we published a five-part series on the two communities, as well as an online component that included photo galleries and six videos. Though much of the work was done before I arrived at the paper, I did get the opportunity to film most of the interviews for the longer feature profiles and went out and shot some additional b-roll.

One of the features focused on Antony Logan, who was the only black male in Southbridge to graduate from high school from 2006 to 2009, a fact that I initially found amazing. In his itnerview, the UD professor performing the research, Yasser Arafat Payne, asked, “How did we even let it get that bad?” I don’t think that our piece really provides any answers to the situation, and, on a surface level, many already knew that Southbridge and the East Side were struggling (heck, even I did and I just moved here), but learning about people like Antony definitely put a face to the issue and hopefully served to make it a bit more difficult to conveniently forget about.

Two months ago, I moved to Delaware to take a job at The News Journal as a multimedia producer. In doing so, I went from a photographer that occasionally shot video, to a videographer that occasionally shoots stills. While I do enjoy shooting video (and I definitely enjoy being out of the office again after a year as Web editor), there are certain aspects of shooting video that take a good deal of getting used to as a still photographer.

Hurry up and wait.There is a lot of waiting involved in shooting video. Often, I will arrive at an event one to two hours before it starts just to set up. Part of that process involves plugging in cables, checking mult boxes and testing audio. Mainly though, it is to secure a good spot within the press area. (Truth be told, I started writing this post a month ago, right in the middle of election season. Since then, I have had to go to fewer of these types of events, though one does still pop up from time to time).

Tripods. Tripods are almost a requirement when shooting video. As a photographer, they make me feel nailed to the ground. I recently went out to shoot the funeral of a prominent state politician. I entered the church, set up my tripod in the back and started shooting. At the same time, our photographer was there running from the front to the back, lifting her camera as high as she could and setting it on the floor. Her action definitely made me feel like I wasn’t doing my job (and at times the reporter must have felt the same way too, because he kept glancing at me and my viewfinder), but sometimes shooting video means standing in one spot for what feels like forever.

Audio trumps visuals. At least to me it does, which is why I am OK sitting back and recording someone talking without worrying about gathering b-roll that I know will be there later (as mentioned above). That person may say something incredible, and I want the camera on them when they say it in case I either want to cut to their face because they are so emotional or (and someone may disagree with me here) in case I somehow don’t get enough b-roll or the b-roll isn’t relevant to what they are saying and I need to put their talking head up. I would rather run a great quote that goes back to their head than not run it because I was running around shooting b-roll while recording their audio.

Less is more. We currently shoot on Sony HVR-AU1′s here at the News Journal (though some photographers have 5D Mark II’s and 7D’s), something that I believe is pretty standard across Gannett papers. The Sony’s record to MiniDV tapes which are captured into Final Cut in real-time. That is, if I shoot an hour of video, it will take an hour to bring that into my editor to be able to work on. Unlike photography, in which one could potentially shoot as much as their card will allow and then quickly sift through all of those images in Photo Mechanic later, shooting video efficiently means capturing the shots you know you need to tell the story with sometimes minimal experimentation.

There is a flip side to the less is more aspect to shooting video. That is, as a photographer shooting video, I approach every video assignment as if I am shooting a gallery. When you are shooting stills, there are those assignments that you just know will not be a gallery. Perhaps it was a press conference, or a portrait of someone destined for an inside page, or you have six or seven assignments that day. Either way, you are in and out. Video does not work this way (it can, but it would be boring). When shooting video, from the most interesting feature to the blandest press conference, you need b-roll. Crowd shots, details of the speaker’s face, his or her hands, all of these let you edit an interview down to the length you need it to be.

One of the things I have learned since I began this blog in 2005 is the importance of maintaining and managing my online identity. It is easy enough to throw up a landing page with a few jquery galleries and a contact section and call it a day. The problem is, stopping there means not knowing what others are saying about you and, more importantly, who might be pretending to be you.

Granted, this all sounds silly and somewhat vain. I mean, who can’t take some criticism? But I am talking about more serious issues. Back in 2006, after I came back from a trip to Nepal, a thread was started on the Lightstalkers forums that insinuated that a friend and I were abusing children during our stay in the country. Worse yet, some people on the forum were willing to believe these posts. It was not until my friend responded to these allegations with detailed accounts of our travels in Nepal, as well as links to our ongoing struggles with the person we believed responsible for the thread, that it was put to rest. Around the same time, a few blogs popped up featuring my image that spoke highly of the same person who created the false forum posts.

The problem is that with the anonymity that the Web provides, it is easy for one man to pose as many, creating false profiles and then providing those profiles with affirmation through comments and replies from other false profiles.

Four years, one fake Facebook page and a few fake blogs later, and I stumble across this gem:

Finding an old post about my time in Nepal as well as a profile picture and my Chips Quinn photo was easy enough, but why would he create the page using a post in which I did not speak highly of his Nepali program? He also changed any reference to my friend Rene and calls her my girlfriend.

To discredit me of course! Who is going to believe the word of a man who is now shooting adult movies and documentaries with my now (fake) girlfriend Rene Edde (the link goes to a porn site)? I literally laughed at loud at this point.

And of course, the icing on the cake, the post label:

Label: My girlfriend Rene Edde. Because who doesn’t categorize their posts based on their fake girlfriends?