Bejing and its Photographers

As usual, it’s been a while.

I graduated in May and have spent all summer watching job listings and sending resumes (though hardly ever interviewing), working both computers and photo, but largely trying to keep myself engaged and busy as I try to find the next stage of my life.  That hasn’t been too hard the past couple of weeks, because I’ve had to vacate the old apartment and move into a house I’ve got some family connections with, and the olympics have been on.

I’ve always been a fan of the Olympics, because I enjoy the notion of all the world coming together and participating in such a grand fashion.  The Beijing Olympics have been a real treat, as my broadband access and NBC’s fairly well done online coverage have been a great way to watch some of the less popular events and have allowed me to get my fill of the games.  I’ve focused on field hockey, though handball, table tennis, and sailing have been fun events to watch too.  Right now I’ve got the men’s triathlon running on the other side of the monitor.

I’ve also enjoyed all of the photography that’s come out of China since the games opened.  Specifically, I’ve been reading the Newsweek team’s blog and while the photos there have been awesome I’ve really enjoyed the personal insights on photography and what goes into shooting at the Olympics, especially now that I’ve got experience at student papers and with the other media here in town and can relate to some degree.  I’ve been trying to decide how I feel about photography and what I want to do with it in the coming years, and I’m soaking up what feeling I can out of what those three have been writing.  I admire the determination and forethought that goes into their specific varieties of the craft, and the willingness to put up with the frantic commotion, the other photographers there, and so on.  I don’t enjoy being in packed crowds and dealing with that sort of environment, and with some of the stories that have popped up on their blog I have a hard time imagining me in their place - heck, I chafed plenty at the NCAA Men’s Hockey Regional just because there was just one photographer that didn’t mind stepping on everyone else to get their shots, much less a whole world’s worth.  Ironically, I’m too well behaved for this sort of thing.

One of the things I was reading while I caught up on the blog today and has stood out in my mind was something Mike Powell wrote in his “Something Different” post:

 ”Simon Barnett, the DOP at NEWSWEEK has given us a very free rein to go shoot “something different”, but sometimes it hamstrings you. You see a very nice picture that on most days you would eagerly shoot. But being at the Olympics there are 300 shooters already trying to shoot it and the pool guys have better access and 200 remotes under it, over it and probably on it! So your shrug you shoulders and wonder off in search of the illusive “something different”. Or you shoot it anyway and hope for a unique moment.”

The mentality that you need to shoot something different has hamstrung me before.  You walk into an event and you get maybe five or ten shots before you feel like you shouldn’t waste time taking any more because its the same thing over and over, or that others are going to have that same shot or its a shot thats been done time and again.  Powell goes on to talk about how he’s shooting with a 50mm and trying to get a feel from his images he achieved in Turino, and how that decision and that photos that result from it may not work for anyone but him.   I was out shooting the Goodguys Great Lakes Nationals Hot Rod show this past weekend and it too was an excercise in trying to get different shots out of the same car-in-parking-lot formula - I decided to go in for detail shots on a number of them and while I liked them on my nice big monitor I wondered if anyone else would on the CT’s site given the small web gallery.

It’s always surprising at about this time during a given Olympics that it’s not far from being over.  I’ve already started to miss them since I know come Sunday I won’t be able to hop online and catch whatever events are going on right then on the other side of the world.   I won’t be able to blow through time by enjoying yelling “sieve” through my monitor at whatever country’s field hockey team just got scored on in whatever language they speak.  I’ll be sad that I can’t watch such a great world event for another couple of years - but with any luck one of my job leads will come through for me before long and I won’t have so much time to kill anymore.

Women’s Hockey Advances to third straight NCAA Championship; Cardinal Photog: “This is awesome”

At the beginning of break, I was under the impression that I’d spend all of break sitting at work or sitting at home, and in the process would get a number of things off of my to-do list.  The Women’s hockey team had a different agenda, and as they punched their ticket for the NCAA tournament in Duluth I rearranged my plans and now write from the Duluth Entertainment and Conference Center’s NCAA working media room.

I’m forced to write from here because our hotel is one of the last on earth that doesn’t offer internet access.  We came up north without having booked a place to stay, and poor college students as we are, we wanted to wait and see if we had a reason to spend a few days here.  Wisconsin shook off a bad first period and put four on the board to beat Harvard 4-1 last night, and soon after we found a cheap hotel not too far away.   Their site advertised internet access, and maybe theres access in the lobby or somewhere, but we weren’t able to find any in our room.  The whole establishment seems rather sketchy, and I don’t feel willing to investigate and try to find some access for us since I feel it would end up being a waste of time.  Today there have been team practices and news conferences and so we were more than happy to get back to where there was some wifi.  We didn’t leave much of value at the hotel, just in case.

Thankfully, the snow that’s falling back home in the south of the state isn’t reaching up in these parts.  It’s just cold enough that the harbors are still iced over.  I’m hoping that since we won’t be heading back until later tomorrow afternoon we’ll miss some of the terrible driving that I’m sure is prominent once again (didn’t Mayor Dave just proclaim that winter was over?).

I can’t share any of my photos yet (and I have a backlog from November of photos I need to get on flickr) but I’m trying to gather enough audio to go with the pictures I’m taking to make an audio slide show for the DC.  I really do enjoy what I do at the Cardinal - hanging out at the tournament has been pretty fun just for this day I’ve been here, even though there isn’t a ton of hype for Women’s hockey.  I’m still constantly picking up lessons on how to do my job as a photo/multimedia journalist, and though I’m not sure if I’ll be able to put them into practice once I’m done at UW (I’m still trying to find a post-graduation job) I’m sure they’ll help me in any personal photo and media projects I undertake later in life.

Course packets: Throwing money down a well

I have the fortune to take an exam tomorrow afternoon in my rhetoric class, and so today has been an exercise in doing all of the readings that I haven’t gotten to because of my schedule. I have a hard time slogging through readings one after another, so I’ve been breaking it up by doing laundry, learning android, and so forth. I’ll probably end up cleaning my room and doing my dishes before the night is through. Who knew that doing homework got so many other things done too?

All of these readings are out of our course reader packet, since I got the ones out of the book done last weekend on a trip to Minneapolis. I didn’t intend to buy the course readers this semester, partially because I don’t tend to do reading in a dutiful manner and partially because my income streams have dried up. Working at the Cardinal for free to the tune of a part-time job’s hours has proved erosive to my bank account. Besides, course readers aren’t as good of an investment as textbooks are. You buy a set of copied articles for $50 which is extremely vulnerable to damage and even if you manage to keep it in good condition you can’t sell it back at the end of the semester. At least when I don’t read my textbooks I can still get a laughably small amount of money returned to me at the store after I don’t “need” it for class anymore.

Of course I miscalculated a little bit and it highlights the one beauty of course packets. I had to have a plan to replace the course packet I didn’t want, and my instinct said I would be able to find all the articles online through the library’s electronic resources. While I found a few of my articles early on for one of my classes, I wasn’t having the luck I thought I would for others. While I knew that the articles had to come from somewhere, it doesn’t seem as though they come through the places easily accessible to me. It became clear that while I could save some cash by not buying packets, I’d have to work for a while just to find the articles, much less read them. The $50 started looking like a pittance to pay to have all the articles together in one spot, ready to go.

(I actually had to buy three packets, so it was more like $120.)

I don’t think it was unreasonable to think that I could find the articles myself online, and I’m a little surprised it ended up being as difficult as it was. As I reasoned, the articles have to come from somewhere and there have to be copies that could easily be given to the library if they were easily given to the copy shop. So why aren’t they? I realize people like to read assignments in a tangible format - I’m the same. I have a hard time reading on a screen wherein a lot of other things are able to distract me. At the same time, I’ll live with that if it prevents me from having to throw money away on paper copies. The option to choose what works out best is what is important. Having them in both places, or even just online so one could print it out themselves seems to make more sense than forcing all the students to buy a big overpriced stack of paper.

Snow Clogs Sinuses, Clears Head

Tonight, new snow is supposed to break Madison’s seasonal snowfall record total of 76.1 inches. That’s taller than I am, and I can’t count the number of plowed drifts I’ve walked past that have dwarfed me in size this winter. It’s almost as if all the winters in the recent past that have cheated us of winter precipitation decided to get back together and drop their baggage in one big seasonal family reunion. The campus area is pretty bad as a result - every time the roads and sidewalks get cleared it’s time for another storm. At this moment, we have maybe an inch of compacted ice and snow over most of the sidewalks and the road is covered in layers of ice in places. I’m not sure what’s worse - dealing with the loss of traction or dealing with the flash flood that comes out of my nose every time I have to go somewhere.

It’s this kind of weather that’s forced me to bring my bike inside. I had to do it a long time ago, in fact - at the very start of our soon-to-be record-breaking winter. I bought it a year ago when I found walking from the extreme west side of campus to the extreme east edge of campus to be impossible in the standard passing time of 15 minutes. Thankfully, last winter didn’t unleash fury as this season has and I was generally able to bike throughout the cold and on into warmer times. As I got used to the bike commute I realized I wasn’t spacing out and thinking nearly as much as I had while walking - inattentive pedestrians and drivers are constant hazards and are primary causes of bike-mounted profanity, and all brain power has to go into making sure bike and rider make it to the destination in one piece.

This winter I’ve been forced to return to my hikes across campus, and its refreshing to be able to actually think or rock out to music on the way to class again. Just today I spent most of my initial walk downtown simulating a couple upcoming meetings and what sorts of things I can say to maintain a strong position in each. On the way back tonight I was trying to figure out how to cram the next couple days into the next couple days, singing parts of Emiliana Torrini’s “Unemployed in Summertime” that I discovered at work, and started imagining a blog post on my brief visit to the Spring Career Fair that was held this evening.

I used to have all sorts of ideas while walking that I would write into my small notebook (aptly titled the “Book of Brilliance #1″) but after swapping my hike for a bike that dropped off considerably. I’m back to getting ideas in my notebook, and I’ve also been using Jott to capture brainstorms before they rain themselves out. Walking around to classes is one of the few times I’m not being clobbered by life and responsibility and it allows me slow down and actually use my head for something other than time and crisis management. I bet a lot of people would benefit from slowing themselves down by giving up their bikes and cars, even if it was just for just a little while.

The only unfortunate thing is that it takes much longer to get between places, and all that time spent walking really dries my skin out. The cold has been vicious, and while I’m fighting a valiant moisturizer war, I’m looking forward to the warm-up that’s (hopefully!) on its way over the next few months. I’ll inevitably bring the bike out of hibernation when the temperature is acceptable again, but maybe I’ll have saved up a good bank of ideas I’ll be able to draw off of before that happens.

Another Go-around

I tend to neglect my blogs. Usually when I get inspired enough to log in to the site and update, I’ll be able to fire off one or two posts before I get sidetracked and a new post drought begins. That’s why I switched to a photo blog at one point, since I felt I could be reasonably certain as a photographer that I would have new content to post. Of course, I have a backlog starting in early November of photos to post on flickr, so I suppose that went out the window too.

But here I am again, and when I returned to check on the status of my front page a week or two ago I was more than a little surprised to see that the order of my posts had reversed themselves. After some initial troubleshooting to see if the solution was trivial–it wasn’t and I’m not sure what was going on–I decided to save myself some time and just get an updated version of WordPress installed. I’m just as lazy in updating the blog as I am updating the software that waits for new content.

I don’t think I can be faulted to a great degree for my lack of writing, though. I went nuts last semester making sure all was in order at the Cardinal’s photo desk, and all indications are that it will be just the same this semester. It’s a labor of love, but a black hole of a time sink; between the Cardinal, work, and classes, there isn’t a ton of time left over to get coherent, meaty posts online.

This winter break has offered a few glimmers of topics to post about though, and when I start remembering them they’ll be here to blow in the wind. Until then, I’m going to bump posting up a notch on the priority list and get new ideas out in a reasonable fashion.

I’m starting off using Powazek’s DePo Skinny Theme, which I fell in love with the moment I saw it show up in my feedreader. Once I get some momentum going I’ll fix myself up something pretty, but when you need a quick blog reboot, I think it’s smarter to save some time and nab something that’s already being offered to you.

That’s it for now. I’ve missed you.