Storyteller

This is my uncle Knolan Benfield who was the first to give me a camera and teach me photography.

Knolan talked with me over his counter in his studio in Hickory, North Carolina in 1979 about how to use this range finder camera he gave me. It took 35mm film and didn’t have a meter.

No meter meant you had no way to measure the light and see what was a perfect exposure. He gave me a roll of film and then pulled out the sheet of paper that came with the film.

I learned about the Sunny ƒ/16 rule. This is where in direct sunlight the Aperture is ƒ/16 and the shutter-speed is equivalent to the ISO. So if you had ISO 64 then your shutter speed would be the closest to that and for my camera that was 1/60. Using the chart that came with the film I learned how to properly expose for Sunlight, Cloudy day, Shade and backlit photos as well.

This is how I took photos when I first started. I dropped that camera while ice-skating and that is when my dad bought me my first DSLR Pentax K1000 camera. I could change lenses and it had a build in meter.

Now in the days of film you just bought film that would work either indoors or outdoors. You didn’t change your ISO from frame to frame as you can today with digital.

I remember Knolan taking time to explain how Aperture and Shutter-speed worked.

One of the most important things he taught me was how the Kodak Brownie box camera worked and how my camera was different.

The original Brownie camera had one aperture of ƒ/11 and one shutter speed of 1/35-1/50 seconds.

Knolan pointed out that by only using the sunny ƒ/16 rule outside meant I could have saved a lot of money and just bought the Kodak Brownie camera rather than the Pentax K1000.

Besides controlling the exposure Aperture and Shutter-Speed give you creativity.

Today I am channeling all those comments that Knolan taught me. If you only shoot at one aperture all the time you are missing out on so much creativity that your camera can do.

Assignment to do

Depth of Field & Lens Selection
4 images with the same composition, altering the aperture and focal length
1. Widest focal length, widest aperture (~ f/3.5)
2. Widest focal length, aperture between f/11-f/22
3. Longest focal length, widest aperture (~ f/4.5-5.6)
4. Longest focal length, aperture between f/11-f/22

Some previous blog posts to help you:
Depth of Field Preview – A tool underused by many photographers
Depth-of-field is more than Aperture

First days of school are happening  this month all over our country. In our family we always took a photo of the kids on their first day. We were all excited each and every year for that first.

Watching your child grow in stature through the years was just one way of seeing positive changes happening for them and for you.

When Nelson, our oldest, graduated from high school he was now in charge of that next school choice and what he would take. Up through high school most all of us have less choices as to what we will take. We have some say in which science course or english course we would take, but we still had few options as compared to the next step–college.

When it comes to first days at college the experience varies a great deal we came to learn when our oldest Nelson decided to enroll at The Citadel. To this day my wife helps other parents each year with helping them navigate military college life and how best to support their student without being a helicopter parent.

When the youngest, Chelle, went to college the experience was so different.

Both of them embraced college and all that entails. They did a great job picking majors that suited each of them just perfect.

There are many others who choose alternative education like YWAM’s University of Nations in Kona, Hawaii. These students take one course at a time for 3 to 6 months. This is a group photo of the class I taught this past February.

Most colleges and universities have some sort of “general education” requirement forcing students to take at least a couple of math and science courses, but many non-science majors will take the barest minimum, and work very hard to put those off as long as possible. Disgruntled spring-term seniors who don’t want to be in the course but can’t graduate without it are a regular and unpleasant feature of a “Gen Ed” courses.

I had one course requirement for statistics that really frustrated me to no end. I took the class three times. My first time taking it the professor’s english was extremely difficult to understand. While later when I took it again I realized this wasn’t the only reason I was struggling with that course.

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”
― Albert Einstein

I then took the class again at Brookdale Community College while home from East Carolina University during the summer. I still struggled. I finally passed the course during summer school at East Carolina. My motivation that last time was I needed it to graduate.

In college everyone is looking to take an easy or fun class that counts toward their degree. Often these classes student’s interest in the subject is better than say their interest in a “required” class, but from my experience this is not all that much better than say where their passion lies.

As an adjunct professor through the years at different colleges I felt like this mom with the child on the back. I was carrying these students way too much. There was little self motivation on their part.

A few years ago I just stopped teaching at a college in their communications program. I had taught there for many years, but the problem was quite simple–the students didn’t really care to master the subject.

However I continued to teach photography workshops. There was a big difference between the two classes. The workshops every student I had really wanted to learn the material.

I never had a student break down in the “college” courses in tears because they wanted to understand something so bad and were upset they were not comprehending the content. My first time teaching at University of Nations in Hawaii I fell in love with teaching once again. I cannot thank Dennis Fahringer enough for inviting me to teach Lighting and Business Practices.

Everyone really seems to be excited when I teach the studio lighting, but are not as thrilled with the business practices. Through the years I have been able to help more of those students jump start their professional careers as photographers. It had less to do with the lighting and more about the business practices.

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
― Benjamin Franklin

Now more than 12 years later I hear that the reputation of the class teaching business practices has many eager to learn this topic. Still many in the class are not as enthusiastic about it as I wish they would be about it.

The best students are the ones who are what I call “knowledge‐seeking”. These are those that are emotionally engaged to do expert work.

This photo of the two young ladies are so excited to learn that they are sharing with each other during their shooting in Nicaragua workshop I did the summer of 2016.

Since 2008 I have been going to The Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia to guest lecture on business practices for Mark Johnson. These were so different from the students I had taught at other colleges.

When Mark called me up last fall asking if I would teach this coming year 2 sections of Intro to Photojournalism I said yes. Since saying yes I dug deeper into the program.

I asked if the students taking the class are always engaged in the content. You see that was what turned me off before. An instructor can only do so much to get a student excited. The student must make an effort as well or there is no success.

Mark told me how there are two classes that they need Intro to Photojournalism to take later before they graduate. In those later courses they must do photojournalism with videography, writing, layout and design as well as posting projects in social media and blogs. If they don’t come out of the Intro class knowing photojournalism well enough to do it professionally then they will not be able to do those classes well at all.

Some of the students I have taught live all over the world and are quite successful today. This is Kongs who has a successful photography business in Nigeria, West Africa. He was so excited to take photography classes and continues to keep in touch letting me know all he is doing.

 

Tom Kilpatrick is a great example of you are never too old to learn. Tom has trained thousands of college students as helping young photographers when he was a newspaper photographer. He taught a few of my closest friends who went on to National Geographic.

Going from film to digital was very difficult for Tom. He told me a few times he almost gave up photography because of how difficult the new technology was for him to understand.

After he finally had made the switch he decided to go on the Storytellers Abroad Workshop at the age of 72 to learn how to do video editing and storytelling in this new medium.

How we value the future affects our desire to learn.

Ever since Dennis Fahringer asked me to teach I have been working with students who had a passion for using photography as a profession. Very few have ever been gifted and just got the content easily. Most have a moment where you can see on their faces a real struggle with the content.

There is a real difference between these students who come up against a wall that they push through. When I pushed to past statistics I wasn’t really interested in ever using it again. These students are pushing through all the struggles of mastering the content because they want to use photography in the future.

“It is not that I’m so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer.”
― Albert Einstein

I have autism and I think Aspergers Syndrome best described my situation. One of the traits is obsession with specific, often unusual, topics for those with autism. Now when I was young it was all about G.I. Joe. Thankfully I grew out of that obsession.

I would over the years find different topics from playing trumpet, chess, toy models and today photography.

I was blessed with Autism. This is what helped me push through difficulties, because my wiring wouldn’t let it go.

This new school year try your best in all your classes to learn the content. You may not see it at the moment but this will help in live a better tomorrow.

 

Airborne can be placed behind enemy lines, and have the capability to deploy almost anywhere with little warning. The formations are limited only by the number and size of their aircraft, so given enough capacity a huge force can appear “out of nowhere” in minutes.

The ability to work with jackrabbit speed is typically recognized and rewarded in business. Simply put, companies like employees who can cruise through their to-do lists at Mach3 with their hair on fire. Because, after all, time is money.

But time is not money if that efficiency is not matched with effectiveness.

When telling a person’s story you must take time to get to know the person and time to explore their story so that you can tell “their” story. You see if you move too fast you are often doing so based on assumptions.

Parachute journalism is the practice of thrusting journalists into an area to report on a story in which the reporter has little knowledge or experience. The lack of knowledge and tight deadlines often result in inaccurate or distorted news reports, especially during breaking news.

The other term similar to parachute journalism is yellow journalism.

Yellow journalism and the yellow press are American terms for journalism and associated newspapers that present little or no legitimate well-researched news while instead using eye-catching headlines for increased sales. Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism. By extension, the term yellow journalism is used today as a pejorative to decry any journalism that treats news in an unprofessional or unethical fashion.

There is a difference between the two, but both are rooted in one common problem–not putting in the time necessary to do justice to a story.

Here are some of the key ingredients to great journalism

Journalistic Truth – is a process that begins with the professional discipline of assembling and verifying facts.

Your community – while most journalism is underwritten by advertisers they are not the audience. You must be serving the citizens in your community. When you do a great job of putting them first your credibility is increased.

Journalistic methods for verification – unlike social media where people “trust” their friends thoughts over and their own gut, journalists cannot use these methods. They must used the skills of the profession where the consistent method of testing information – a transparent approach to evidence – precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of the work. The method is objective, not the journalist.

Journalistic independence – you must work very hard to not be drawn into a crowd, organization, to a person of power or anything that can compromise your ability to be unbiased in your journalism. This also includes be careful that your newsroom doesn’t create it’s own elitist group of its own.

Watchdog – informs the public about goings-on in institutions and society, especially in circumstances where a significant portion of the public would demand changes in response. – wikipedia

Fact-checking statements of public officials.
Interviewing public figures and challenging them with problems or concerns.
Beat reporting to gather information from meetings that members of the public might not otherwise attend, and to observe “on the ground” in broader society
Investigative journalism, which involves information-gathering on a single story for a long period of time

There are even more elements to good journalism than these listed here. The point I want to make it getting the story correct requires being thoughtful and taking the time to get it right.

What is sad today is that people trust their friends over journalistic institutions which helped create the atmosphere for “Fake News” created by Russia to actually impact the United States culture.

There have been journalists who have desecrated the profession, just like many priests have done in the church lately. Sadly much of the public believe that these ‘bad apples’ are criminal beyond rehabilitation.

Sadly many journalists today are fighting battles that they didn’t create. Just remember to be diligent in telling a story that is truthful. It just may time some time to do it right.

Your old photos can look even better today due to the advances in technology. I went back to this photo of my daughter’s first day of school ten years ago to re-edit the photo in the latest version of Adobe Lightroom.

Now you may like the earlier edit, but there are more possibilities with a few changes in Lightroom. First of all they did a major overhaul of the main engine in the software and then adding new tools like Dehaze.

Today you can pick a color profile and use Dehaze that were not options in 2010.

Another control that was implemented since 2010 was Lens Correction improving all lenses by correcting for their imperfections.

Back in 2010 I didn’t even try to edit this photo. With the dehaze control I was able to bring down the background much easier than doing this in 2010 would have required.

TIPS

Shoot RAW – you have more information to work with before exporting a JPEG in Lightroom
Folder for RAW and separate folder for JPEG – I ingest and put all my RAW files into a folder and then when I finish editing and export I put those in a separate folder JPEG
Archive all photos – Keep the RAW images and your JPEG images. You can later return to these photos and discover some gems due to the software improvements in the future.