Job Shadowing

For my JRN 422 ("The Photographic Process") aka PJ bootcamp - class I went job shadowing on Friday. If you follow my blog you can see my initial feelings here. My good buddy Jake May drove me to Jackson, MI, and I tailed Dave Weatherwax at the Jackson Citizen Patriot at 1PM till 11 PM, covering two assignments. The first was a piece on Northwest High School's mascot, and the second was to cover a high school football game between Concord and Springport high schools.

Here's my best shot of the night:

Springport sophomore Keith Nebelung tries to escape the hold of Concord junior Devin Matteson at the varsity game Friday, September 11 at Concord football field.

I was in a world of confusion and frustration. Dave loaned me the CitPat office’s Nikon D2H, which was definitely a step up from my own D60, but I’m not familiar with the D2H at all. Focusing the D2H was one of the biggest issues. For fear of backfocus, we set an autofocus button separate from the shutter, and I always use the half-shutter on my own camera to autofocus. I was also shooting with a long lens for the first time – I borrowed a 70-200 mm 2.8 Sigma from the Journalism Department for the occasion.

I had never shot football before that night, and while I grew up an avid Packer fan, I don’t know football well so even finding the right action was a challenge. When I ran through photos, an embarrassing portion were of the fakeout runner – no football in sight.

Lighting wasn’t easy either – by halftime the sun was disappearing and the Concord field is very poorly lit, so we had to start using flash. Not bounce flash, but direct flash, which made for even poorer pictures in my mind as I continued to battle rising panic.

Dave was patient with me and helped me figure out the settings of the D2H, and gave me frequent pointers – where it was okay to stand by the sidelines, how best to set my flash, to stay ten yards ahead of the plays, and to make sure to snap frames of the scoreboard to help remember what happened in different plays. At times, he reminded me to take the camera off my face, saving my butt from a stampede of sidelined players as they ran along with plays.

Shooting football was exciting, but by the end of the game I was furious with myself. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t manage to get more than a few decent frames. Out of 500 photos, there were only about five I felt were worth much. The images were blurry, back-focused, out of focus, too dark, not of the ball, of a chaotic dog pile of nothing, or off-kilter of feet or grass. But Dave said if a photographer comes out of a game with nine or ten usable frames, that’s a good day. He also reminded me that if you beat yourself up over a shoot that’s already done, you’ll never enjoy your job.

I even shot my first car accident – as we (Jake May and I) left the office, there was a squeal of tires and a crunch of metal and we booked it, hearts in our mouths, around the corner to a crash within a minute of it happening. For the first time, I was cussed out for photographing something.

For more images from my job shadowing experience, check out the set on my Flickr.