Thought Piece #5

            I like that LaBelle mentioned that good features are anywhere that there are people. This is something that I feel like I tend to forget that there can be good picture opportunities to be found anywhere if you’re willing to look for them a little bit. I think that I never consider taking my camera everywhere with me because I have thoughts in my head of what I should be taking photos of or want to take photos of and feel like those aren’t things that I could find while walking around town or around campus.

            His section about photographing life transitions kind of made me sad. I am not sure if this is something that I would ever be able to photograph, I feel like I might be too emotional to do that. I think it’s a really cool idea and could be a very good and heartfelt story to photograph, specifically, someone losing an important part of their life. But I think that I would only be successful in photographing positive life transitions. I guess I COULD be successful doing negative life transitions, but I don’t think it’s in the books for me.

            The part where he talked about picture packages was a little helpful to my thoughts about our picture story class. At first, I kind of was thinking that the class would be taking multiple photos of the same topic and putting them together for the sake of a story, not necessarily AS a story. Which now that I type this out, sounds kind of stupid of me. BUT it made me think more about how I need to have a game plan for shooting my photo stories and go in with a shot list and/or ideas of what to get. I need to understand the story that I am wanting to capture before I get to the actual photographing part of the project.

            I was a little confused by the entire two pages that he used for pictures. I think that they are the photo combo that he is using to show President Reagans life, but I can’t be sure. I feel as though even the captions to go along with the second page of these photos aren’t any help at all to tell me what these photos are of. I’m not sure if the goal was for the reader to be a little confused to show the photo combo or if I am just kind of dumb. I do, however, also think that it was a waste of space. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the photos because it is less words that I have to read, but having the book, I feel like there are supposed to be more words for me to actually learn something from it. I think including photos can help someone understand but I also think that he overdid it with the sheer number of photographs he added.

            Finally, I like the idea of photo sequences. While I don’t think that these would be right to use for this class necessarily, I think it would be cool to use in my profession one day. Not exactly as close together of images, but I think having some sort of sequence would be cool to have for wedding photography. I’m not sure how one would use this for news photography unless there was some big maybe even tragic even happening, but I would like to see it done. I think that, if done correctly, it could add a cool element to my picture stories but I am not sure that close together sequences would be something I’d want to add.