NAACP and Trenton Duckett

Four assignments this weekend.
Here are two...

NAACP Day - ARTICLE



Search for Trenton Duckett in Ocala National Forest - ARTICLE

9/11 service

These photos ran as a photo package on page 8A, black and white.

Shows!

Patriotic Show on 9/11 in The Villages.
ARTICLE

My Favorite Year
ARTICLE

Plane Crash

Yesterday I had 3 short little assignments in the early afternoon. I got them done pretty fast, not because I was rushing but because they were very simple. So I finish my assignments and head home for the day. Home is 45 mins from the office and the city of Ocala.
At about 6:45 pm I get a call from one of the Ocala editors telling me there's been a plane crash and he can't get a hold of any other photographers. So I begin my mad dash back to Ocala. Turns out all the photographers were out of town and one was in church until 8 pm.
The 2-seated airplane crashed in a peanut field a little south of Ocala. Hiking across the peanut field was interesting. I was praying for no snakes. The plants were almost up to my knees.
The occupants of the plane died upon impact, an elderly man and woman. They couldn't be identified when I was on scene. The small plane was registered in Louisiana so the people were most likely not locals.
Here's the ARTICLE

UPDATE ARTICLE

Rodeo!

The rodeo was late Saturday night. Late night rodeos are a challenge for lighting as I learned. The arena was so dark and had a weird mix of lights, some looked to be flourescent and the others looked like tungsten and then I was throwing my flash into all of that. This time I did however take my flash off my camera and had Khuong hold it off to the side for me, attached still to the camera by the 2-foot-long Canon cord. It helped quite a bit.
I can't find the article online now, even though I read it yesterday...
But here are the 3 photos that were published. One of my favorites was left out. Again, I'll try to post it later.





Add-on:
One photo that wasn't published.

Gearing up for Ecuador! (and the rest of the semester)

I am part of the Florida Fly-Ins program, run by Prof. John Kaplan, this year at the University of Florida. Every year the Fly-Ins program goes to a South or Central American country to document a city and culture in words and pictures. This year is the first year traveling to Ecuador and I'm super excited because it's the northern neighbor to Peru, where I just was this summer.
We've only had one meeting at this point. But the class meets once a week to prepare and research the country and area before departing. After the trip, Sept. 29 - Oct. 7, the class will continue to meet once a week to wrap things up and prepare everything for the online magazine that is published every year and for the gallery showing that happens near the end of the Fall semester.
This year is also the first time photographers are going to be REQUIRED to do multimedia work. YAY! We haven't discussed it very much yet but I think this means we will just be creating a short soundslides project with our photos and narrating it ourselves. Hopefully we can incorporate some sound from Ecuador.
I'm not sure yet what story I'll be working on, but with the departure date about a month away, I'll have to know VERY soon. So for now I'm hitting the research books and I'll be trying to make connections for my story before we even arrive.

This is going to be one fun last semester for me.

I'm also piling on 3 other classes with the Fly-Ins class. Those include Advanced Design (dealing with newspaper design and photo editing), Advanced Ballet (my body is regretting that choice) and Renaissance Art in Northern Europe (my last Art History class for my minor).

Also I'm seriously starting to look for winter internships to follow my graduation. So on top of everything else, I'll be sending out applications for those this month!

Elephants Homecoming

Not real elephants. Statue elephants.
Yes I was slightly disappointed in learning that too. This past weekend the Appleton Museum of Art in Ocala celebrated the return of a elephant statue/water fountain. The fountain had to undergo restoration and apparently the community really missed it.
The museum had clowns, student jugglers (who were very good), and crafts for children. There were also some more grown up activities for the adults including a video on the restoration and a speaker from Silver Springs who spoke about wildlife conservation. All in all it was a nice little assignment and here are the three photos that ended up running as a package.

First multimedia piece!

Bluegrass in the Park.
This was part of an article on free things to do in Ocala. ARTICLE
Just scroll down the article and you'll see a link for the slideshow.
I sure learned a lot from this first project. Definately use some kind of mic to cut down on background noise and WIND! Darn wind. I used Audacity to edit the sound and Soundslides to create the slideshow. All in all it took me two days to do the project, that includes learning the two afore mentioned programs. I think the slideshow turned out a little long, but after losing the audio track halfway through creating it, I was just glad to be able to rebuild it quickly. From now on though slideshows will be 3 mins max. But anyways, I am excited about this multimedia stuff now and can't wait to do another project!

Feature and Hospice Thrift Store

I finally got IPN sent to my cell phone since I don't have access to a scanner as a stringer. It seems to works pretty well, I've only received one page so far so time will tell if it's worth it.

This weekend was semi-busy.
Saturday was short, but on Sunday I had 4 assignments.

Here is a feature from a park on Sunday.


Here is a man waiting as his wife shops during a block party sale at Hospice Thrift Store. She must have found some deals since he was left sitting there for about 15-20 mins.

Control Line planes

ARTICLE
I shot this assignment two or weeks ago. It was pretty fun. They didn't use my favorite photo so I'll try to put it up later.