While this mess has since been cleaned up (mostly) and the paper handed in (I got an A-), it pretty well illustrates how my semester has been (and continues to be).

Right now I’m waiting for 162 RAW files to process to place into a time-lapse of contra dancing. I hope it works. I’ve never done a time-lapse before. I’ve also never done an audio slideshow this in-depth before. Sadly, I’ve done stories before, and this project isn’t really turning out to be one.

I don’t know why I’m getting so worried about this project. Maybe because I feel that a final project should be stellar. Or maybe because I’m just a perfectionist and can’t settle for handing in a “draft.” I took a look at a previous project some by some convergence students – which I didn’t want to see, but now I’m glad I did – and even in it’s baby stage, my project just looks better and sounds better. Maybe not better, per-se, but cleaner for sure. (Okay, I’m going to be honest. It’s way better.)

What I need is an editor. Thank goodness we have a work day tomorrow in class. I hope to get some feedback on the photos and perhaps some of the audio bits too. I’ve edited down a few nice chunks that I can play. Maybe I just need one more point of view about the dancing. Saturday’s it. Crunch time, last dance before the due date.

(I think I can, I think I can, I think I can … )

(one of my favorite photos from the second shoot.)

Yeah, I think I fell behind a little on that Google Reader experiment I tried earlier in the month. Maybe I can get this cleared by the end of the week. Or maybe I’ll just hit ‘read all’ and start over.

Anyone out there have good system of keeping track of their news reader on a regular basis? I always seem to forget to check it.

I’ve decided that for professional reasons I will need to move my website (and possibly my blog) to a more capable server system than using my free hosting (that hasn’t been upgraded since ‘02) and wordpress.

Sorry guys.

Anyways, I’ve gotten as far as setting up the new blog function at the new site erincarlyschwartz.com and it’s totally not working. I found a theme that matches my website idea – unheard of, right? – and then I found out that it hasn’t been updated since ‘07. YARG!

I’ve got a few other options that I’ll think about, but I kinda [read: very much so] fell in love with this design.

Can anyone help me out with the CSS styling? There’s a few functions and colors I really want to change, but I can’t seem to figure out the stylesheets. No web design background for this designer.

kthxbye.

(original photo by me, CPOY graphic treatment by me and Jeff Lautenberger)

I came home at 10pm tonight from volunteering at the CPOY judging going on all week at school. During that eight hour shift, I saw some really bad photos and some mind-blowing amazing photos. Take a look at the winning photos from sports portfolio [screencast only for now] and portraits, and if you really want a good laugh, tune into the semi-final round of the portrait session to hear me read off the entire set of captions.

Anyways, it reminded me that I should post some fun photos from the last week or two. I do have assignment images done – somewhere – but I haven’t uploaded them yet. I’ll share those when I can actually think about writing something witty. My wit left the building hours ago.

The fall colors were spectacular this year. I hear it’s not a regular thing out here, so I feel pretty lucky.

Also spectacular were the sunsets in St. Louis during the APME conference. This view was the best part about the strange hotel.

Our next class assignment – sports. I can’t wait to showcase the good shots. I took over 1,100 frames between two sporting events, and ended up with quite a few winners. How the hell did I shoot sports for the paper so long ago on a D1/D1X with 512MB and 2GB cards?

Yes, I’m a jersey girl. I know my bagels. And we managed to find some in town that could vaguely pass as being a decent bagel. So we bought some. Okay, more than some. But hey, they were half off!

Enough of this non-witty banter. I need sleep, and I’m uninspired by my own photography today.

(and hopefully both time-saving and informative)

Val Hoeppner lead an APME session on free and cheap training and management materials available online, and I had the pleasure actually listening (instead of taking photos) to her discussion. I’ve yet to go through her entire list of goodies, but one that stuck out in my mind as a handy tool was the Google Reader.

I gave the reader a go a while back and promptly gave up after adding just a few feeds. For one, it was ugly. And being an image-based thinker, plain text just didn’t cut it. And a few blogs I followed were ‘friends-only’ and didn’t allow me to see the posts in my reader.

So off it went into oblivion . . . until today.

I spent a good chunk of this morning and evening setting up feeds – photoblogs of colleagues and friends, industry related links like NPPA and PDN, news sites like the Washington Post, Washington Times and the AP, and guilty pleasure sites like xkcd and PostSecret. Topping off the feed-blitz was the addition of the Better GReader 0.8 add-on for Firefox to make the reader less ugly. (Automatic previews are slower, but much prettier. I like reading the stories in their original format.)

Hopefully all this time invested in getting everything set up will help save time in the future while enriching my knowledge of the world around me and keep me up-to-date with awesome photography.

Or it’ll just encourage my incessant procrastination.

also, note the use of the helvetireader skin. i love helvetica.

Last week seems like a blur.

One minute I was running around my apartment making sure I had A. enough clothes and B. all my photography equipment while trying to finish up a Fundamentals project, go to class, attend meetings and apply for next semester assistanships. [more on the Fundamentals project later.]

Then I found myself driving out to St. Louis, checking into the hotel, and starting coverage of the APME conference via Twitter and through photos.

Whirlwind doesn’t even describe it. Not quite frantic, but definitely intense and fast-paced. From one session to the next, our team blanketed the convention with coverage for those members who could not make it this year. It’s a shame they didn’t – the sessions were fantastic.

Wednesday night, I was scheduled to cover the opening reception at the City Museum.

The place is incredibly beautiful – and massive. This is just the first floor area. There’s so much more. I can’t wait to go back.

There was a tank with turtles. Lots and lots of turtles. They got a lot of attention throughout the night.

A joke was made about being able to brag about attending a conference where they served peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, in light of the current economic landscape of the news world. The really did serve little sandwiches.

No reception is complete without a silent auction. The best part was the live auction, when the caller was trying to get people to bid on a $6,000 vacation. See above photo caption for irony.

Then Wednesday, I photographed two other sessions, the Associated Press Report and the APPM’s Community Journalism and Innovation.

Members of the audience reacted to the playing of Julie Jacobson’s video and audio diary of the situation when she took the controversial photo of the injured Marine who later died.

The panelists watch a presentation on some of the AP’s most innovative and exciting storytelling work.

In the APPM session, attendees were asked to write out the core principles they believe in as journalists.

Yes, we even watched a segment of The Colbert Report to illustrate just how far the Commercial Appeal’s story on public records (gun licenses) went. The clip is at that link.

So yeah. It was a blast to cover, and fantastic to meet some inspiring people. Don’t listen to those naysayers out there. Journalism is NOT dead – it’s just changing.

And from what I saw at this conference, there’s a bright future ahead. We just need to make sure we can get there.

I’m heading out next week to cover the APME 2009 conference in St. Louis as a volunteer through school. Yes, that’s the Associated Press Managing Editors – and the Associated Press Picture Managers (APPM) sessions will be covered as well.

In the last few days, I’ve set up the flickr account and the flickr pool, while other team members set up the twitter feed, facebook page and wordpress blog.

Yeah, we’re everywhere.

So, while setting up all these things for the coverage of this event, I realized – HEY! I’m covering the Associated Press. I’m going to be meeting all sorts of cool people.

… I have no business cards.

:: headdesk ::

My resume and letterhead have my newest [read: originally created three years ago] logo, font and colors. But I struggled with the business card for the longest time. So today, I sat down with my trusty copy of InDesign and channeled my inner graphic designer and started concepting. Here’s the final result, which will get printed at Kinkos sometime between now and Tuesday afternoon. (I’d rather get them done professionally, but I really only need a few, and I can’t afford the rush charges on getting them done with moo.

Spiffy, eh?

Someday, they’ll match my equally spiffy website . . . that currently exists only in my head and temporary files on my server.

Maybe I’ll update it over winter break. Maybe.

Almost midnight, Monday.

This week’s (well, and last week’s too) project for Fundamentals was the classmate project. [cue scary music] We picked names out of a box for a round-robin style photo assignment, where I photographed someone, they photographed someone else, who was photographing someone else, and so on.

The goal?

Tell this person’s story. Whether it’s a literal ‘thing,’ like the significance of this one kid’s blue shoes, or a feeling, as with the adjusting period of some of our international students, we needed to convey the story in picures.  It’s a lot harder than it seems.

My story was about Christie, a stretched-thin sophomore taking 19 credits and being active in a sorority and three other volunteer groups on campus. I wish I could have had another week to work on the project, but I lost that due to MPW. More situations in which to take photos may have brought a bit more variety to the images. But we learn from each assignment, and I hope to carry that across to the next big story project, our final.

Here’s my opening image.

Editing was tough. I knew I wanted certain photos, but filling in the holes was near impossible. I found myself attached to certain images, but tossing them aside for something that told the story clearer or was better technically. Eventually, I went back to the entire take and found some overlooked gems that ended up in the final edit.

But looking at my classmates’ projects, I could easily see what worked and what didn’t. I knew what I wanted to see to drive the story that the photographer didn’t necessarily have. This time, I was a bit more vocal in the critique, making sure to ask “what’s the story?” if it wasn’t inherently clear. Usually I’m on the quiet side, as our critiques are often much more lenient than I would be if left to my own devices. Today, I felt it appropriate to ask that simple question and make those critical observations. I hope my comments helped.

Maybe I am good at this editing thing. But only when the photos aren’t mine.

I don’t know why I’m procrastinating so much today. Maybe it’s the 32 hours + of gloom and rain we’ve had here. (Although I believe it has stopped raining now, it’s still pretty gloomy.) Or perhaps it’s because I’m in the middle of reading an article for my Mass Media Seminar class that’s so over my head, I don’t know half the words it uses. See sentence example #1:

“West argues that the epistemic skepticism found in some strands of faddish deconstructive criticism and the explanatory agnosticism, or nihilism, associated with the work of descriptivist anthropologists and historians have made the “categorical mistake” of collapsing epistemological concerns of justification in philosophy into methodological concerns of explanation in social theory.” (Kincheloe, McLaren. “Rethinking Critical Theory and Qualitative Research.” p141.)

Ummm, yeah. Maybe we should look at some pictures I’ve been meaning to post instead.

An outtake from my “Interaction” project for Fundamentals. I didn’t show it because you can’t really see either face, but there’s just something I like about it. Maybe it’s the angles? Or the idea of a hairdresser being an unsung artist?

(On a unrelated note, our aging neighbor who is on constant oxygen just walked past our door, coughing and wheezing like something from another world. I worry about him sometimes.)

These are some of the single images I submitted to CPOY this year. I doubt I’ll win anything, but at least I’ve entered. Next year though, watch out. I hope to have some stellar work.

Okay. Now that I’ve been productive in my procrastination, I’m feeling like I should be productive on some school work first. But where to start . . . the paper about MPW this year? Reading more dreadfully scholarly articles? Or maybe re-writing my lit review question to actually reflect what I wanted in the first place? (I’m hoping to research agenda/image setting through a question about the White House photo office.) Or figuring out the specifics on my ethics term paper topic? (Image manipulation and where the ethical line stands, something like that.)

:: sigh ::

I agree. Let me barrel through this reading. Only a few more pages to go on this one and three more interesting (hopefully) articles after that. Then I’ll write fun papers.

Wheee!