Also, if you never really thought about it, I can't legally post info about my assignments until they've already been published by my employer. It's not like I can give the news before it's been given by the person that gave the assignment to me. Confused? I hope so.
Well, without ado and no further gilding the lily....
Ok, a little more ado... Internship history is as follows. I've been applying like a madman around the Michigan area for any sort of newspaper internship. I sent out roughly a dozen applications for the fall semester with little response. Not to put a negative toward where I'm working now, but they were the only ones that actually showed me enough courtesy to keep contact. The other papers were like trying to contact the president about gay rights.
Long story short, Grand Haven got back to me and I'm glad. They're not a huge paper and that's how I want it to be to start out. Which I guess brings me to a rule which from my experience (or lack thereof) is possibly lost on rookie shooters:
YOU ARE NOT AS GOOD OF A SHOOTER AS YOU THINK YOU ARE.
Yeah, I said it. You're starting out. With no experience--or very little--you're not reliable. Don't expect people to hire you right off the get go. You need to take what you can get. Paid or unpaid. Yeah, you're likely to not get paid at times for your work. But trust me, it can definitely be worth it.
OK, enough of that. More after the jump (which I will put in soon).
First assignment is as follows:
(email)
Lucas,
Can you shoot high school volleyball for us? Email your best 5 images in by the next morning.
Sincerely,
Photo Department
So how did it go you ask? Not bad. Thanks for asking. Having never been to this gym (something that happens often in a journalist's career) I came prepared to have to blast the heck out of that gym with my tiny strobes. As David would put it, gyms are unforgiving dark caves from the bowls of a photographer's nightmares. So I come prepared. Lucky for me the gym was lit better than I could have expected. This however does not stop me from playing with the use of small strobes to add some nice effect to the shots. Yeah, I want to freeze those players in mid jump like there's no tomorrow. I ain't foolin' with no chance of walking away with bad images. Not on my first assignment.
Since I was early (about half an hour, get there early, it saves you a lot of stress) I walked the perimeter of the gym and looked for the best places to attach my strobes. Of course there is absolutely no spot to clamp or stand my strobes up unless I want them up almost 20 yards from the game. Thanks, but no thanks. Then I remembered something that I've heard countless times but never actually heeded: KISS. Yeah, why do I NEED to clamp these strobes? I don't, so I walked up the bleachers to the area where the benches hadn't been drawn out (electric retractable bleachers) and laid a light filtered strobe down on the bench facing the court from the side. Same goes for the opposite side of the gym. Two strobes facing towards the volleyball court so that they blast perpendicular to the players, lighting them equally from left and right.
Getting me a lighting scheme seen at left.
Now, I'm not much of a sports shooter. I don't get to shoot volleyball much, if at all. Needless to say, I was rusty. To cover my bum I shot from lots of angles and tried to get as much of a difference in different player positions (i.e. at the net, and back) as possible. Gladly, because my flashes were set a a low power setting, I could shoot like mad and not have to fear killing my batteries.
So where do the newbies come in?
From a beginner's standpoint I wasn't really shooting in any sort of "advanced" fashion. So if you're new to shooting sports, don't be scared. All you need to do is put your camera settings to a more "action" oriented setting and don't be afraid to get close.
Lighting aside, if you're shooting at a high shutter speed and a low aperture (I'm not going to go into detail on this stuff, you should know it and if not here and here) and are getting reasonably lit shots, you can't really go wrong.
I'm not sugar coating this here kiddies, you should be thinking about:
- rule of thirds
- where's the action?
- is the ball in the shot? (seriously, would you really publish a shot without the ball?)
- are there any strange background elements sticking out of someone's head?
As I was saying, knowing settings aside, all you need to do is just shoot to your hearts content and make sure you got something. Practice makes perfect and there is never enough practice.
Back to me (it's all about me). Even this seemingly simple assignment did have it's rough spots. I had tons of trouble finding the action. I forgot the general actions of volleyball. Yes, it's good to know the general ways in which the game flows when you're shooting it, all sports apply here. I didn't know where to look when someone set the ball, so I was way late on shooting spikes for at least the first 10 minutes. But eventually I got into the groove for the most part.
As the game ended I got ready to leave. Gladly, since I wasn't using massive, expensive, cumbersome, obnoxious (yougetmypoint) lights; I was able to leave the gym in a short time. I grabbed my flashes off the stands, stuffed them in my bag and left. No need to tear down really.
Now comes the fun. Uploading. When it comes to uploading to the office, every office is different. I work mostly from a "we email you, you shoot, you email the photos in" basis. This can be nice with it's easy of at home photo work, and can also be a pain with it's trouble of at home photo work failure. Guess which one happened? Murphy's Law. I wasn't able to get photos to send to their email so I had to burn a CD and drive it in the next day at 8 am. Not something I wanted to do, but was ready to do it. When people say "deadline" in journalism, they mean it and you comply. Other wonderfully bad situations for uploading involve computers with operating systems with which you are totally unfamiliar (Windows users I'm looking at you and your fear of Mac OSX). Or an operating system that is so old that you can barely navigate it.
Good news is, the photos got in, I got some good images and I got to play with my flashes. You have no idea how fun it is for me to mess around with photo equipment. I could do it day and night... and do at times.
Next post should be about shooting a fish boil dinner. Look forward to it.
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