The Snake Lady

Capstone Project: The Snake Lady

Her love is for her Snakes.

The Snake Lady, Connie Koch has been raising and showing snakes for 27 years. She uses the snakes as a teaching tool for by putting on snake programs around Sedalia and central Missouri. Her snake programs have been held at Whiteman Air Force Base, schools and even birthday parties.

Her connection with snakes began with her father on their farm. He told her that black rat snakes would eat the mice that would try to feed on their grain. The black rat snakes could live in the grain bin and eat those mice. He was actually able to put a dollar amount on the snakes for how much they saved him in wasted grain due to mice.

See the video on my site.

Second Website Critique

I have been looking at David Burnett's photography website, and I like certain elements of it, but I hate many of the navigation tools in the site.

I really love his basic layout, I like the white background with the Navigation bar to the right that is unchanged on each page. the entire site looks very clean. I believe that this is one of the most important elements of a photographers website. It should be clean and completely out of the way. The entire idea is to get the potential future employer to see what you are doing and it should help them navigate through your site without being distracted or confused by the site itself.

Once I started to look into his galleries I noticed an annoying trend. When you scroll through his galleries a large white arrow appears that sits on top of his image. This arrow lets you move forward to the next image. This already annoys me and it should annoy and photographer. He has a flash navigation bar at the bottom of the screen that sits nicely over the white background and this is really handy and looks great.

When I was looking at his tab for his books I clicked on a link that was supposed to direct me to a link where I could buy his book. Every link on the page leads me to the next page where it says Forbidden, Error 403.

In the end I think they have a good design and layout, but they need to fix the links, and I would recommend trying to find a way to push those arrows off his image. Otherwise I was very impressed with the website.

The Photo Essay, readings

The Photo Essay

I completely agree when Chapnick said, "Almost every conceivable subject that deals with the human experience can serve as the basis for an essay."

We have to keep in mind that there are a lot of people in this world, and one thing that may seem unique to an individual can still bring a large group of people together. Everyone does something that maybe a bit odd, but if we keep in mind that everyone is a little odd then by revealing that truth it can bring people from all over the world together.

In the Lamott reading I do agree that when you pick a controvesial subject in a photo story you need to take a moral point of view, the lack of this could potentially leave the reading lost in between the two sides. It is possible to portray both sides, but it would take much more space. In a 90 sec story it is impossible to go into real depth.

Work Report

My first story was featured barrel racing at McNail arena in Lebanon, Missouri. I followed a rider, Megan Wehmeyer, 17 who has been racing for nine years. In 2009, she won a National Division one rank with the twentieth fastest time. She got third this week, which was still very good.

I am burning to get back to shooting with Megan. She will be at Boone county fair racing again, so I want to get these images before the race so I can say that it is coming up giving it another news worthy quality.

I believe that I did a great job capturing the action, which was my biggest fear, but I was very disappointed in my lack of a strong portrait. When shooting a new event for the first time, and being limited to shooting only 300 frames I tended to work on getting my action shots and I didn't get a very strong portrait that would rise up to the other images in the story.

I plan on going back and taking a few images of her interacting with her horses that way I can fill that gap and feel better about my work.

In the post production I thought that I had a strong take, but I was surprised to see some of the changes we had made to the order in class and I really liked the way the images began to work together to form that third effect.

POYi

While watching POYi this year I had a completely new experience compared to previous years. The Judges critiquing multimedia portfolio section came from a more diverse background than I have seen before, which so we heard from a new perspective.

The judges were: Mike Zerby from the University of Minnesota; Drea Cooper, filmmaker and commercial director; Meg Theno from the Chicago Tribune; and Kim Grinfeder from the University of Miami.

Drea Cooper spoke his mind and offered a unique perspective that stood out and gave a new flavor to the judging. In the beginning of the event they were rating the portfolios based on the difficultly of the work presented inside. They kept going back to a few pieces looking at how they had differed and what made them special.

Cooper had said, “The most difficult element to master is capturing a close personal story while working in our field.”

This outlook made Cooper ranking many of the stories different from most of the other judges, and they debated placing the final three projects.

Another very interesting point in the debate came when Zerby added that you don’t always have to follow the rules. One piece didn’t have a strong subject to hold it together. It jumped around showing different elements from the event and he said, “It just had a lot of good moments strung together to evoke a strong emotion.” The other judges recognized what he had said, and they awarded the piece an Award of Excellence.

We had discussed breaking the rules in class, but it was great to see the judges in POYi awarding those projects that decided to venture outside the norm.

One piece about Haiti had many different stories about Haiti and the judges awarded the project for looking at the entire area and they really dived deeply into the culture of country and told the viewed more than the effects of the earthquake.

This piece was viewed very highly by the judges, but they ended up pushing down in the awards based on the lack of total diversity.

I believe that the Judges did an excellent job looking into each piece and viewing the work in its entirety. In the end I did agree with most of the decisions made by the judges. I love multimedia and seeing some of those projects really showed me the work you can do through multimedia.

The Los Angeles Times had a strong variety with excellent multimedia pieces that pulled it up the ranks. It stood out above the rest for the time and dedication they put into their stories. They had some incredible work that blew me away.

I feel that the judging this year has been more balanced and I agree with more of the decisions made this year compared to previous years.

-Daniel Longar

Reading for Picture Story

Reading Blog Post #2

I really enjoyed the Bill Jay and David Hurn reading about selecting a subject. Selecting subjects is a difficult topic that I have been struggling to overcome since joining this school. I seem to always search for stories that interest others while what I want to do seems to be thrown on the back-burner. By looking into the subjects that I truly care about I understand that it will reflect in my work. I have been looking into final topic subjects, and I really want to peruse white nose syndrome that has entered Missouri and continues to move west spreading by both humans and bats. I also understand that to have an audience which is greater than one person I need to have a subject that is universally interesting, but I cannot just sacrifice what I am interested in for the PoY type story.

The Lamott reading makes a lot of sense when thinking about story subjects. It is important to just start looking or thinking. One method which I have started to use is work through the Internet the way it was intended. YouTube is one of the best examples of moving through the Internet world. Start at one topic that interests you, and then look at the links and see where you go. As you are going through the videos think is there a local angle on this type of topic. This could produce all kinds of story ideas. By looking at videos that interest you there is an interest that can develop into something more. With this reading I believe that the key is to keep looking and you will run into ideas that will produce more ideas. Keep track and even if you are not ready to handle the idea right away, save it and it may have more relevance later.

These are the Images I would use in my Layout.