Lofi Fun

While I was in Minnesota I broke down and picked up a Holga and a couple rolls of FP-4 to shoot while at my brother's wedding. I was inspired by a good friend of mine who had shot her pimpin' gold Holga at my own wedding earlier this summer. I'm still working out the variance of the viewfinder to the actual film framing as well as the focusing guesstimations. There's something refreshing about taking a step back from technology and being forced to lose absolute control.

Holgas are funky little plastic cameras that each have unique quirks like light leaks and vignettes that are never the same from one camera to another. You get either f/11 or f/16 at 1/100th for a shutter and little icons that represent distances for the manual focus lens. Since this was the first roll of film I had run through the camera, it was all going to be pretty much a surprise. All in all I think the results were fairly to be expected. Now I'll try some color film and some different exposure tricks to see what else I can come up with. That's all for now.

Mountain Biking Again

Was asked by a good shooter and friend of mine, Marty Caivano, to shoot some photos of her riding in her team kit and on her team GT rig. So we headed out to Hall Ranch in Lyons with fellow photographer Joshua Duplechian for a morning of fun and fotos.

I was a bit of a tool and forgot to bring my mountain biking shoes and got to ride mountain pedals in running shoes on a short seat. Have to get that seat post swapped out so I can really ride. Oh, and ditch 30 pounds of camera gear on my back might help too. Had a blast out there though. Made a couple fun frames with the help of Mr. Duplechian as well. Took a few minutes to get back in the groove of shooting since it's been a while since I've shot something moving like this.

Here's hoping we win the team photo contest!

VJ trip

Had to put together three VJ sets for a class prject in my Digital Cinema class for the end of the quarter. The only limitation was that the audio was to be a single element. That was stipulated because we will be projecting three different sets at the same time on three "screens" (a wall projection on a DU building outside) and funnel all the audio into one output. The result...don't know yet. It happens on Monday, June 1 after 8pm next to the Schwader Art Building on the DU campus at 2121 E. Asbury Ave. Bring a blanket or lawn chair and something to sip on for the show.



Here's what I think is the best of the three that I put together. Trying to get better about driving the audio and the video at the same time. It's difficult to mix audio while not letting the visuals get stale. I think once I learn how to use the program a bit more effectively I'll make some better compositions. I tend to get too wrapped up in making music and sound and leave the visuals unattended.

I'm working to develop a better library of video clips to use in the productions and get away from using other VJ's clips. The theme was dreams and space, but I didn't really have a developed idea and I think it comes through in the composition. It isn't as cohesive without a backbone or storyline to drive the piece. Let me know what you really think. It's a bit outside of what I've been normally sharing, so let it fly.




Here's links to Dreamspace 1 and Dreamspace 2.

Trance trip

Had to build a VJ performance for my Digital Cinema class. By VJ I mean video jockey, but not the MTV VJ when they actually played music videos. Meaning mixing and mashing video clips in an artistic fashion using a computer program. I decided to use Resolume Avenue 3 instead of Max5. Just a bit more flexibility in Ave3, but since it is a demo version a text watermark and audio watermark are included in your output file.

After a bit of practicing and lots of video codec converting I happened to be reading a blog post about turning off a particular setting to make the program work faster. For some stupid reason I changed the setting right before I was to perform my set live in class, which was part of the assignment. I changed the setting back after seeing a few things change that I didn't like but it did not "undo" the change. As I was doing my performance everything was acting funny and several clips wouldn't play or work as designed. It was turning into an Amtrak route with the engineer texting while not driving. Despite all that, the class thought it was a pretty cool sequence of images and all. Luckily.

I actually spent too much of my time working on creating an audio track than I did on the video clipping and setup. I mixed together a handful of tracks from a couple trance artists to play outside of Ave3 as I didn't really get the sense I could play an entire audio track with the way I was running clips through the program. This was a recorded practice session before I screwed up the settings. So have a look and listen.



The concept was, just as the title of this blog, a Visual Journey based on the reflection of travel and transport in our bodies as much as our world.

Series 90

So while wandering the 16th Street Mall making photos today with the 3600 intermediate class I took a venture down an alley. That venture started a series of frames for the rest of the morning.

Series 90 will be frames at 90 degrees to any particular wall with 90 degree angles as part of the visuals. I remember stressing my life away trying to come up with a personal vision and style for a semester project during my second year at Colorado Mountain College. I cursed my professor for months trying to come up with something, wondering why we had to do that "stupid assignment." Now I find myself doing that semester project in a matter of minutes.

I also had recently looked at Chip Litherland's series "accidental rothko" V1 and V2 which triggered in my mind as I was looking at a grouping of hard lines and angles in hard light. Had a bit of fun with it for a little while. We'll see where it goes....

Visit the Flickr pages of the photos to see them larger.

Here's a couple bonus photos from this morning as well. Found myself in the alleys a lot today. I was pretty bored with the mall I suppose.

Love

Had a trip up to Seattle and Sudden Valley, east of Bellingham, WA, last weekend. Love was heavy in the air like the rain soaked clouds hovering over the lush landscape.

As with my personal life, my personal vision has begun to shift into new dimensions. Seeing life differently with immense emotion and passion pumping through my mind and body is fascinating. In addition to the life changes, many notions of perception and interpretation from my courses at DU are impacting my motivations with visual capture/creation.

I've shifted away from having an overwhelming sense to have clean, structured and blatant storyline images. Embracing and connecting with the internal emotions and other perceptual senses of being present in a moment to drive the visual narrative is allowing me to not force images onto the sensor of the camera. Letting the light shine in and fall as it may is lifting the burden of wielding a heavy hand. Moments are coming together much more naturally and easier. All I need to do is simply press the button to open the lid to my light bucket.

Refresher course

Shot some game action photos for the Centaurus High School basketball team the other night. It's been tough shooting sports once a month and still get some good frames. Shooting sports is like playing them. Practice to play.

Just set up a single light on a bleacher railing and bounced it off the white ceiling and blue ducts. The ambient light is close to non-existent (f/2.8 @ 1/320 @ ISO 5000) so after a few frames of finding the sweet spots of the light hitting the floor I started to play with some different ideas. Don't know if they work but feel like they are something different from the standard wire sports photos.

I get another go at it on Saturday but I think I'm going to give two lights a try and see what kind of stuff I can get.

Going Old School

Dug an old Nikon F film camera out of the closet with a Nikkor-S 50mm f/1.4 lens on it. The camera and lens are pristine. They were given to me by a customer at the photo lab I used to work at several years ago. The customer's father had the camera for many years and by the looks of it, didn't really shoot with it much. She decided that I was to be the new owner after his passing. She said that she could tell I enjoyed photography. I wasn't too sure about the exposure being accurate, being that it is a spring fired shutter and it's been sitting around in the darkness for so long. But, being curious, I decided to give it a go.

I then dug around in the fridge and the Ziploc bags inside larger Ziploc bags holding a variety of flavors of film. Inside a roll of Kodak Royal 25 swam to the surface of plastic containers and I figured that would be the best to be able to use the giant aperture out in the blazing Colorado sun. I figured I would set the camera to its fastest shutter setting of 1/1,000th of a second at f/1.4 and let it fly. There are a couple exposures at f/2 at 1/500th, but that only for a few frames.

I just wanted to play with that slim depth of field and the beauty that is film. Many of the images are far from my personal vision and style. I've decided that I need to explore more and not be so uptight about imagery. Everything shouldn't be perfect in every frame. It's downright gleeful that I can only shoot a single frame at a time and the lack of instant "gratification" on a computerized camera. The suspense of wanting to see that latent image is fantastic. That distinguishable racket made by the spring-driven shutter is musical. If you couldn't tell, I truly miss shooting film.

I went to reload the old iron horse and found another roll of the Royal 25. So I'm looking forward to using that relic more. I've got a ton of expired film chilling in the lettuce drawer. I might as well use it to fuel my visual dependency. If anything, I've learned in the last several weeks how dependent I am on creating visuals by controlling apertures and shutter speeds.

My name is Josh and I'm an addict.

Fall Sports and Feature Hunting

It's that time of year when the evenings are crisp and there's a pig flying. Well, part of a pig anyway. It's fall and prep football is here. As is CU women's soccer. The problem with the game tonight was that the team I was covering didn't have a full roster. They only hand-wrote the starting offense and defense on a sheet for me to shoot a photo of. Spacing it out about five minutes later, I started banging off frames in this spectacular golden hour light.



The real problem arose when I had three photos that I wanted to turn in and had no way of identifying the players from the local team. Thus I was forced to turn in what are essentially trading card photos. Just a photo of one of the guys on the team in a simple frame and possibly bland moment. So the others will slowly die on the cutting room floor of my mind. And as a result you get to look at a couple other frames from the past 26 and one half hours.

Enjoy

The Re-Shoot

So I was asked to give it another go on the CU football preview cover photo. I was none too happy about having to re-do the assignment after all the hurdles and difficulty of the first shot. But I swallowed my pride and tried to do what I could with the situation.

This is the new version:

This is the original version:

And just for added fun I tried this today:

So there they are. Which do you like the best? Disregard all my whining and bitching about the situation and tell me which photo is the best one to use on the cover of a special section for the 2008 season.

Previsualizing is key

After a meeting with the Sports department about shooting a unique photo for the CU Preview section front a couple days ago, the reporter Kyle Ringo and I discussed an idea of having two guys ready to kill an offensive lineman. The original idea was to do full-bleed across the section front. (Not sure if it's going to happen now because of a strip ad on the bottom of the page now.) After thinking it over for a day or two I decided that it would have to be three lights minimum I've got in the trunk to do. In some respects I wish I had two more lights, but what do you do with limited resources? You adapt and make due with what you have.

Thankfully had a D3 to use full-frame with a 14mm and the Live View feature as the camera was inside another helmet. I could barely see the composition. Being given barely five minutes to shoot with the guys due to a mix up during media day for the Buffs didn't help matters much. George Hypolite had to get to a conditioning session. Luckily I was 30 minutes early and was able to get things sorted out as early as I did. While the sports information team scrambled, I moved a bunch of furniture and darkened a room as much as possible. Then guessed on where to set up the lights so all I would need to do is have the two guys get into position and adjust as fast as possible.

Strobist: Two SBs @ 1/2 power @ 50mm into umbrellas tilted upside down into the faces with a SB on a cord on the floor (accidentally) into the helmet of the camera. I didn't call slop, so it doesn't count.

Luckily it worked out fairly well, considering I fired off seven shots of this version and quickly had to work in a different pose as backup. Sports wanted a vertical just in case the original idea wasn't going to work on the front.

I'm satisfied with the result, but the only thing I'm running into is that a lot of my portraits are starting to look the same. I really need to work on some new tricks for my bag o' tricks. And quick, considering there's not much time left in my tenure. A wee bit more time to work with a subject might help as well.

UPDATE: My managing editor really dislikes this photo and has essentially demanded a re-shoot of the photo. "The face mask and angle make the giant football players look small." After a heated discussion I'm pretty much deflated over the whole deal. On to the next thing...

Shooting without a storyline adds difficulty

So I was sent up to Lyons with the task of shooting a video about RockyGrass. An annual bluegrass festival and workshop held on the grounds of a small complex along the banks of St. Vrain Creek.

While it was fairly easy shooting video of all the folks making, learning and playing the various instruments of bluegrass, I was completely unsure of what my storyline was. It was a transition period from the Planet Bluegrass Academy to the RockyGrass Music Festival. So that could have been one storyline, but it wasn't very interesting really. We had already sent a still photog the day before and there was another photog shooting again before I had arrived. That kind of drove me away from focusing too much on the academy participants. Then there's the campground of people attending one or both of the different aspects of the event. The only catch was that there were few people around sardine-like tents and vehicles to train my lens on.

There I went, roaming around shooting this and that with no concept in mind. The other issue with shooting music with a single camera is trying to figure out a way to shoot multiple angles of a situation but keeping the music and movements in sync. Lots and lots of details are needed to "Band-aid" all those camera movements while the tape is still rolling. After shooting nearly an hour of footage and talking with a few people, I happened upon Bryan Conley. He was practicing a couple songs in the middle of a small grove of trees away from most other players and obtrusive sounds. Looking at my remaining tape time and knowing I didn't have a storyline yet, I decided he was going to have to become the audio backbone for the production. Not as good of a piece as I would like it to be, but considering it's after midnight and I've been stressing out my MacBook Pro's processor for a few hours, it'll work and I'll learn from it.

Post-publishing editing

Don't you love waking up the morning after shooting something right on deadline, only to find a photo that you should have used instead of the one that appears on the front page of every subscriber's July 5th newspaper?

Just rushed too fast through the editing process. I should have known that there was a reason the FTP transfer didn't work the first time. It was a sign to re-edit and find this one.

Oh well, I'll just pack my things and go jump off a high dive and cure my ills.

Trying to find some momentum

Been having a turbulent couple of weeks since returning from Scotland. My car was totaled in an accident when a guy ran a red light at 40mph and took off the front end of my car. I'm still bitter about it I guess, considering it's been 10 days or more and I'm still bringing it up. So now I'm in the hunt for a new-to-me car. The catch is I have to get something soon. The rental car coverage is running out. Then work has been somewhat difficult. The continual burden of feeding the beast with the limited resources (when a position is vacated it is essentially eliminated) is starting to present more hurdles and difficulties as the weeks go forward.

And that will only continue to get worse. The web editor will be leaving the paper in mid-August. So her duties will undoubtedly be divvied up among the skeleton crew of a newsroom. Meaning that more video and content management for the Photo Department. Then around the beginning of September I will be leaving the paper. I finally came to a decision to not continue to work at the paper while I return to graduate school at the University of Denver. My boss wasn't excited by any means at the news. There is a chance that my position will not be filled, but I hope for the paper and public's sake it does get filled.

The difficulty of chasing breaking news while continuing to produce the everyday content with those limited resources is beginning to wear everyone thin. I'm a "quality first" kind of creator. The notion of doing something "just good enough" doesn't sit well with my work ethic and personal style. Another term bestowed upon me is perfectionist. With all that being said, I'm really struggling to find balance with producing content, be it stills or video, that arrives at a middle ground between perfectionism and the other. Throw in lots of video troubleshooting and training of others in the newsroom and you have a guy struggling to find momentum to get to the end of August.

I love being a photojournalist. It is the best job on the planet and probably one of the few things I'm fairly capable of. But the tension of opposites between perfectionism and "something" is difficult to swallow. I feel like I haven't been able to use any of my skills to their potential, resulting in mediocre work. There just isn't time to "work a situation" as I tell students. It's more about shooting the "for sure" photos and video and bailing in order to get on to the next thing. That is if there is a situation that even presents an opportunity to make photos and video. Seems like everyone in the newsroom is so rushed and crushed for time that everything is decided on at the last minute. Meaning there have been a lot of portraits lately. The running joke in photojournalism was that it's 75 percent portraiture, 15 percent waiting, and 10 percent photojournalism. Anymore it seems you can erase the waiting number and add it to the portraiture number.

Now it may appear that I'm complaining and whining. Sure. I am. I'm also bitching, complaining, crying and whatever else you would like to call it. I'm an artist and a creator who sees potential to make an impact and inform with the craft. The problem is that I don't feel I'm able to do it in an effective manner with how the newsroom is run anymore. These conditions and constant cutbacks have effectively made some of the best in the business quit and go on to something else. The craft will suffer even more for it as the quality of the product continues to slide. Some have told me to let it go because I'm a "short-timer now." That's not conducive of a perfectionist if you happen to know one. I'm still staying hours after I'm told to leave in order to help produce and post another photog's video.

So here I am, trying to find some momentum to enjoy the last weeks of working one of the most interesting and important crafts in this democracy. Because, from the looks of it, the industry will have either collapsed or gone through a complete rebirth by the time I graduate in 2010.

Rush rush all day long, rush rush while I make this song...

Was given the assignment to shoot stills and video of a "walking school bus." What's a walking school bus you ask? It's where several elementary school children and their parents gather up in a group as they walk to school in the morning. But looking back on the day, I wonder if it wasn't the opening of Pandora's evil little box.

The route was barely a mile. I knew it wasn't going to take long to walk a mile in the cold and snow. One issue was that I forgot to grab a video camera in my dazed fog of editing a beast of a video for another story the night before the assignment. I was already a bit perturbed that I had to do double-duty, so I grabbed my audio kit and decided I would make an audio slide show.

After working on that vicious beast of a video, which was a two-camera video shot with only one camera, I learned that stills allow for a wider scope of wiggle room in the editing process. A still can be stretched out a bit longer or shortened as needed and the time viewed is not based on the action or for the most part the audio track. A video clip has a C-130 load more influence from the motion and the audio in most cases. So back to my bus project....

I was feeling that doing the audio and stills would lend to better maximization of the brief time given to gather content. Well, looking back on the morning and in the editing area –which is not the quietest environment to be in nor void of distraction– I decided that I may have been wrong in thinking that I was better off shooting stills and gathering audio. I've determined that in many respects I should have driven back to the office before the assignment and grabbed one of the Canon XH-A1 cameras and JUST shot video. Then pulled frame grabs for the paper to run through the VooDoo Tool. All the audio and visuals would have been gathered at the same time. I wouldn't have "missed" a shot or three. I wouldn't have "missed" a great sound bite. I wouldn't have been so damn stressed out and sent a pathetic and out of line text message to my boss.

Lessons learned. The hard way. Sometimes the best way really. The countless possibilities present in multimedia also present countless learning possibilities that can make a very structured and eager person feel humbled after a bit of rage. Not that I would apply the notion of shooting only video and pulling frames to every assignment, but it will be something I will take into consideration and appraise the final possible results given the situation.

Gateway to the soul

This last week I was handed two assignments that had to very different opportunities for photos. One was about a man who was thrown in Panamanian jail by a business partner for six months. He was in the office for an interview and it was after dark. The story was to run the next day, so I was asked to make a glorified mug shot.

N0118BOBBY05c.jpg, originally uploaded by ©JL.

As soon as I met Bobby Hammond I felt I needed to illustrate the story as best I could given the situation. I had already set up the studio to make a photo, but quickly decided that I needed to show this man's patient yet aching eyes. I tend not to look too much into people's eyes when I talk to them. I feel that it is intrusive at times and wouldn't want someone else peering into my soul with professionally trained eyes. But Bobby's eyes were so bright despite all that he had endured in what is regarded as one of the worst places to be put jail. He had his collarbone broken while detained and although it healed, he is now limited in his work as a landscaper. He waited as I fumbled and flailed to capture his gaze into the camera.

Portraits of people in their environment are fairly easy to create. All you have to do is carefully select aspects to keep in the photo, find a good location for the person to sit and literally throw some interesting light on it all. A straight up portrait is much harder to do in a photojournalistic sense. There is nothing to fill in the information other than a persons face and eyes. I don't know that I was able to show Bobby's story in his eyes, but I hope they are engaging enough to make you want to read the story.

N0121BRUCE51c.jpg, originally uploaded by ©JL.

The following day I was sent to make some photos of Bruce Randolph Jr. He has a barbecue restaurant in Boulder and was present for Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington D.C. in 1968. He also cut the reverend's hair in a Denver barbershop during the civil rights movement. Once again, how to illustrate an event that took place in another city at another time? I made several photos of Daddy Bruce Jr. working and serving up his beef or chicken plates. But I didn't feel it would hold water for the story about MLK. As Bruce sat near a window to talk with another man I couldn't help but watch his eyes as he talked. He is a very carefree man and told me to go about my business as soon as I walked into his world. I just made photos of him as he talked. He showed an entire range of emotion as he talked about an issue with family and church members. After he finished he went about his work and I asked if he would let me get some audio of him while he worked. I might not have stated it clearly, but it seemed that he would rather sit and talk than just speak as he worked. So I clipped the mic and barely hit the microscopic red button to start recording when he began to talk about the trip to Washington D.C.

For this story the audio was the key to conveying the message. His eyes were a an integral part, but to hear his voice and the feeling behind it is completely different. To hear the tone and richness of his voice about the civil rights movement and how it effected him struck me hard. The problem was all the photos I had made had nothing really to do with his interactions with Martin Luther King Jr. Just random portions of time in a place so far removed from those difficult times. So here's a video that may be a bit different, but hopefully the message still comes through it all. Thankfully our society has changed. Not nearly enough, but maybe it will continue to change for the better.

Creativity lives and breathes...

So I was asked if I wanted to do a video on Tom's Tavern as part of an advancer for the burger-joint's closing. I was sent a link to a new audio slide show site that had a cool idea (see the Santiago show) of shooting in one direction for a long period of time and having the audio reflect the different aspects.

Well, there really wasn't any room for me to plop down my camera and scope out one booth for an hour. Plus the owner's son wasn't real sure he wanted me to be around at the busiest time of the day. So I decided to take a bit different approach for the video. I wasn't so worried about following a certain person or thing through an arc of time. I basically shot some video, and some stills, of what I thought looked cool. Then I was just trying to grab some audio that reflected the news of the place closing a little, but not so worried about who was saying it.

You see, there's a lot of folks that don't want the place to close, but the family has decided that since the owner, Tom Eldridge, passed away earlier this year from brain cancer that it was time to shut the pub down. It was his pride and joy of nearly 48 years and they wanted it to end that way. Not under someone else, even family. So I wanted it to be more about what the place stood for an not about the people going there. Not sure I pulled that off, but nonetheless...

It was a lot of fun and some interesting learning experience working in post production. I can't wait to take my next step in finding new edges to blur.

Random portions of seconds

I've been producing some videos lately, but for the most part they are just talking heads for BuffzoneTV. So I figured I'd post a few photos from the last week or so. Been shooting some fun stuff really. One day I was paid to hike 14,000-foot Grays Peak, another day I roamed around in the heat by the creek and most recently I shot photos of a national skateboard event.

It was a six hour hike to the top with all the stopping to shoot photos and talk with folks. It seems like there is a magic line on that mountain at about 12,500 feet above sea level that the air vanishes. Despite being a fairly active person I was sucking air. Chasing people up the rocky summit to get photos was good fun, but I didn't put on enough sunscreen. There's also no atmosphere to protect you at that altitude either.

There were folks from the entire range of experience climbing 14ers. Scott Otteman, top, has summited all of the recognized 14ers in Colorado and was teaching his seven-year-old son to climb some of those same peaks. It was their second 14er in as many days. Robert Vinopal, on the right in the bottom frame, has climbed Grays Peak every year for 21 years, and was hiking with a friend, George Kikel, who was making his first summit of a 14er. Along the path there were folks from more than seven states on a Thursday afternoon. So getting paid to do something that folks travel hundreds and even thousands of miles to spend the day doing made for a pretty good day. But the burger at Tommyknocker's in Idaho Springs was pretty good too.

It was pretty hot last week in Boulder. I was simply told to go find some "weather art." So with the mercury creeping towards 100, I started driving around and found several folks walking with tubes towards the creek. I know it's an easy route to go. Just going to one of the most popular free ways to cool off, but it's late in the summer, several students were back in town for the start of classes at the University of Colorado and we as a staff had used up just about every "hot weather" photo option already. In an effort to keep it fresh, I decided not to shoot people on tubes in the water so literally. I did shoot the literal photos, and one did run, but luckily my editor picked one of these to run as lede after sweating a ton hopping around from rock to rock.

This past Saturday I was assigned to shoot the Seismic US Nationals of Slalom Skateboarding dual slalom races in Longmont. In most respects, being a former junior high scrub skater, I was too busy watching the action instead of making photos. One of the most interesting races was a 14-year-old kid from Longmont, Joe McLaren in the first photo, racing a 43-year-old father of three from Atlanta. The racers start at the top of a four-foot tall wooden box with a ramp leading them onto a street lined with plastic cones spaced between six and 12 feet weaving left and right down an about a six degree pitch. They race head-to-head twice with the fastest total time and least number of cones knocked over winning. The "kid" screamed through both sides of the course and went on to win the Open Division and a cash prize. I wanted to shoot a video just to be able to show the level skill and speed, but most of the gear was being used already and I didn't feel like doing double duty on deadline. Been doing that a bit too much lately. It's too taxing at times. Maybe next year.

It's not a feature video

Embattled University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill was dismissed today by the Board of Regents. I was told to shoot video of the events with fellow staffer Mark Leffingwell.

We tried not to step on each other too much while roaming about with hundreds of other media members. But I feel like it adds a little layer of difficulty to produce a video with someone else. You don't know what they are getting for footage and their style of shooting may be vastly different from yours. Then each one has different thoughts on how to assemble the story in editing.

It was a long wait for the decision to finally be made on Churchill's future and then all the typical media frenzies ensued, as is always the case with this story. So here's the end result of my first news video.

All this video work is a ton of work. I'm actually really wishing for a couple still assignments just to get to be a photographer again and not a videographer, video editor, web master and IT support member all at the same time. I'm missing the clicks....

Curveball

Last week I was supposed to shoot a video on University of Colorado quarterback Bernard Jackson. They are doing 7-on-7 drills on their own in the evenings, so the plan was to go shoot some footage of him practicing and then do a bit of an interview with Camera reporter Kyle Ringo.

So I had all kinds of ideas for ways I could put the video together. Before I continue I'll explain a little...you see, Bernard has had an adventurous trip through the Buffalo football program. He was recruited as a quarterback but was asked to play wide receiver after learning the offense as a quarterback. Then after a season as a receiver they had him return kicks and other random jobs. I think he may have had to take the trash out once or twice when the grounds crew was hurt. Just kidding. So last season he was asked to play quarterback once again, but under a new coaching staff. He was about the only thing that somewhat worked on the Buffs offensive side of the ball last year. So for all his trouble in the first few years, his gift is that he is listed as a quarterback still, but there are at least two other guys in front of him on the depth chart. One just happens to be the head coach's son, but it's not what you are thinking on that front. This season he might even end up playing defense just to get on the field.

Bernard is a really good guy and a gifted athlete. I made photos last year of him and his son playing for a story that Kyle did when it was learned that Bernard was finally going to get his shot at quarterback. He just needs to learn a bit of time management.

Back to the story behind the story behind the story...so the players decide to cancel the 7-on-7 drills. I learn of this from Kyle the moment I'm setting up my gear in the parking lot.

"OK, no practice to shoot. Just going to do an interview?" I have a pain run through my conceptual mind, it's described as seemingly endless minutes of a collegiate athlete talking to a reporter about something I don't have any footage of and won't happen again for another few days. Like coach said in high school, "Sit on a fastball, but be ready to adjust for the curveball and change up."

So I adjusted and shot a few things here an there while waiting, but mostly just shot the interview. In order for it to not be super boring I tried to move the camera position a little once in a while during the two talking and figured I would just use still photos from other practices and games. It's not going to be a homerun, but if you keep your weight on the back foot you can adjust and at least hit a single or double to opposite field.




I'll keep swinging. This video gig is a constant learning experience. It's been a challenge to adapt to all the learning of video and still try to capture good moments in stills. Sometimes though, I do feel like Adam Anderson. You get a pretty easy opportunity to end the game with a simple flip to second but try to do too much and throw late to first and let the other team back in the game. Just learn from it, that's hopefully what we all do from mistakes.