Alleged Photographer Learns Valuable Lesson

When I set up my Twitter and Instagram accounts for the Teaching Multimedia class, I had the nerve to use the word photographer in my profile to describe myself.  Deluded would have been a more accurate term.  And now I have to describe what I’ve learned in only 500 words.  Impossible! 

I ventured out to Columbia’s Main Street on a bitterly cold (to a Southerner, anyway) Sunday morning to collect photos for this assignment, armed with camera and tripod and clutching in my gloved hand the list of ten tasks and the notes I’d taken from this class and the Teaching Photojournalism class last semester.

You see, even though I fancy myself a photographer and have my friends and family fooled into thinking I am (although I quickly and demurely add the word amateur when people say I’m a photographer), most of my photography successes can be attributed to dumb luck and the auto function on the camera.  I’ve always thought composition is my strength, but I have very poor technical skills.  Even after the photojournalism class, I told myself I’d experiment with what I’d learned over the holidays, but that didn’t happen with all of the other things to be done (mainly recuperating from school, cleaning house, and sipping eggnog).

So what have I learned this past week?  Not quite everything…but so much!

Finally the triumvirate of ISO, shutter speed, and aperture are starting to make better sense.  I started out consulting my notes (and I still glance back at them when needed), but now I have a better grasp of what to adjust and what those adjustments mean and can do.  At times, I began taking test shots at the extreme end of things: ISO 1600, shutter speed really fast, aperture wide open…or vice versa…then I would begin making adjustments: If the photo was too bright (in some cases, I got a 4x6 white block instead of an image), I knew to lower the ISO.  Or close down the aperture.  Or both if one or the other didn’t work.  It was like working through proofs in geometry class: If the photo is too dark, then I need to dial up the ISO.  If, then.  If, then.  Dial up.  Dial down.  How professional I now sound in my interior monologues!     

I also watched a Lynda lesson that included instructions on how to make light trails from moving light sources, such as car headlights.  I was able to achieve this by slowing down the shutter speed.  This lesson also showed me an app called Slow Shutter, which I immediately downloaded.  It does the job, but I found I need an adapter to attach the iPhone to the tripod to keep it steady, so I ultimately got better results with the camera.

The biggest thing I learned is that I have a lot more to learn, and to do that, I need to keep practicing.  Just not on a windy, freezing street in the middle of February…

Know-it-all Makes Startling Educational Discovery

Not to be a know-it-all, but…

That’s a line only a true know-it-all would open with.

Heritage Classroom.  Massie Heritage Center.  Savannah, Georgia.  National Register of 

Historic Places (April 13, 1977).  Photographed by Stephen Milligan (September 26, 
2015).

Not to be a know-it-all, but the first module for the Teaching Multimedia course was pretty much a review for me.  I’ve been advising my school’s newspaper since 2003, so I know it all.

Protecting sources?  Know it.  Maintaining objectivity?  Know it.  Cutline?  Know it.

I thought this was a multimedia course, not an introduction to journalism!  I had visions of immersing myself in technology that would help me help my newspaper students class up our little online paper with interactive elements and slideshows and video—video taken by my Broadcast Journalism I class on our fancy new audio and video equipment (if we can ever cut the purchase order from the confines of district red tape).  And I would be able to use all of these new audio and video editing skills I had hoped to acquire in this course with the broadcasting students, too.  Our first broadcast would be so professional that people at school would think they had mistakenly tuned in to CNN, not WWJK News.       

So far, we’re learning journalism basics.  Easy.  This course must be for journalistic greenhorns, not a know-it-all like me! 

Then I got to Task 4: View these live links.

The very first link took me to a list entitled “Multimedia Tools.”  I was dazed as I examined the list—I’d only heard of a few of these resources (and that few includes Google Maps).  But weren’t these the very same resources I’d hoped to be exposed to during this course?

My smugness at being familiar with basic journalism concepts continued to fade as I delved into “Tutorial: Multimedia Storytelling: Learn the Secrets from Experts,” the next link.  This is where I learned how complex putting together a multimedia story package can be.  Shells and storyboards and fieldwork!  Oh, my!

But the kicker came when I investigated the “Best Online High School Newspapers” link.  What incredible journalism these high school students are engaging in!  The sites showcased here are so professional looking—with movement, photography, Twitter feeds, scrolling updates on sports scores…even live broadcasts.  But isn’t this, too, what I wanted to learn?  The tools and training to help my student staff build a snazzy journalism program—nay, a media empire—are before me in this course, the very course in which I had, only days before, thought I had known it all!

Now, I realize I am just one of the greenhorns.  This course is exactly what I need as a teacher to help my students bring our online newspaper to a higher level of quality, to start this broadcasting program off in an innovative fashion, to entice the introductory journalism students to continue in the program, and to engage our audience with newsworthy content delivered in a fresh, exciting way.

But before that happens, this know-it-all has a lot to learn.