PJClass: Familiar Person

Alison Marsh, a sophomore at Archbishop Spalding High School, fixes her hair before eating breakfast, Saturday, September 8, 2007.


So I'm taking MCOM 391, Photojournalism 1. Not bad for being a sophomore, eh? My teacher, Monica Lopossay, is a staffer at the Baltimore Sun. Having grown up in a hick part of the country, she's actually a really interesting, passionate photojournalist. I hope to learn a lot from her and her colleague, fellow Sun staffer Christopher Assaf, who occasionally stops in when Monica is not available.

Our first assignment was "Any familiar person." We already had our class of editing the images and questions about "Is this good enough?" or "So I can crop the baseball out of this, right?" And of course there were the people who had dogs as their subjects, or people who shot their familiar person from a good 30 feet away.

But hey, we're all learning.

I had a hard time choosing which one to submit out of my take. I chose this one (see beginning of post) because it is more natural to me. It is my sister, and she knew I was there (I was literally a foot behind her). She doing what she always does in the morning, so there's a simple caption.

The hardest part for me was choosing content over quality. I had another image of my fiend Dan that would have fit the bill just fine, not to mention it was more clear and more in focus than my final decision. However, it was not as intimate. Here it is:




Choosing images is the hardest part of what I've had to do so far. I don't suppose it gets any easier.

Speaking of choosing images...

There are some days when everything I shoot just seems dull and rote and "by the books." Nothing seems to be in focus, the composition is terrible, and the images are just...well, in layman's terms, blah. Then there are the days that rock. You're on your game, with images just pouring through your lens like butter in an oven (hey, analogies are a lot like bad days sometimes...).

Today I thought I had a pretty good day. I shot field hockey at Villa Julie, which gave me about 20 images I could have used. Sweet. The choosing: not so sweet. But I managed, and this was the image that will run tomorrow:



Nothing crazy, but not too shabby, IMHO.

Ok, Sunday night at TU. Time to go do all my homework for las...this week.

-Later-