Follow ME (@MarcySalo) on Twitter!

I have been experimenting with Twitter for nearly a year now.  I am by no means a Twitter-a-holic, but I have come to appreciate the value of Twitter searches.  I love ReTweeting good stuff.  I enjoy the ease of sending private tweets (like instant messaging).  It’s all so good — and fun!  I learn all kinds of interesting (albeit sometimes useless but for its entertainment value) stuff by watching “Trends Seattle,” but is Twitter a tool?

Short answer:  sure it is!  As individual people, we can tweet anything we want.  “Overheard at Nordie’s: ‘just traded in a pair of Tom’s for these AWESOME stilettos!’”, “9-Year-Old Struck by Hit & Run Driver at Denny & Dexter”, “Fear ME.”  These are just a few of my favorite recent tweets.  And some are actual news.  Seriously, news is happening and we’re there – and almost always with a phone — which means we can tweet!  Do we need to be accurate? Yes.  Do we need to confirm veracity before we spread the word as Gospel truth when we hear it on Twitter? Yes.  Do we want to know what’s going on on the other side of the world in the middle of the night when no legitimate news outlet is direct-feeding us info?  You BET!  Storms, crimes, political cover ups – you can bet someone is tweeting about any and all of them right now.

Some of my favorite tweets are the links proffered by reporters.  Whether they’re links to photographic stories, or just insights offered while on location, these first-hand reports are always intriguing to me:  under-produced and over-exposed.  I love that in a news story.  Take for example, Nick Kristof.  Here’s a tweet that he made on Tuesday, May 31:  “When 1 of Pakistan’s best journalists is tortured & murdered (by a gov agency?): http://bit.ly/lcoXLR (via @Mehmal).”  I LOVE that I can be linked directly into this Pakistani newspaper and read their account, not an account by the Guardian, or CNN.  It lends a whole new level of authenticity to what’s happening in places and to people that we can barely imagine, much less know personally.  Not to mention the delight of the news organizations at their ability to push out “Breaking News!” to the millions and millions of Twitter users NOT registered on their news sites!

I would imagine journalists spend no small amount of time either trolling Twitter for news bits, or researching facts through Twitter.  I cannot think of another resource – worldwide – with such immediate and multi-user verification opportunities built-in.

Truthfully, one only has to look at the sheer number of relevant and urgent news stories broken via Twitter, and the users who populate its content:  the killing of Osama bin Laden, Michael Jackson’s death, the firing of Charlie Sheen from Two and Half Men… how about the hundreds (or thousands) of first-hand accounts breaking news of the Super Bowl, and all those TMZ spotters?  Let’s face it, there’s nothing more immediate, available to EVERYONE and soon, more ubiquitous than Twitter.  If you can’t beat it, you might as well join in.  Just know that as the pool gets more crowded, you’re going to have to learn to use “Lists.”

Tiger

Below are three examples of good short video stories, in my opinion.  It was rather difficult to narrow the field, given the 2 minute rule (plus or minus a second or two), but I think these hit the mark.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7366848n – CBS Evening News video the near-miss that was the rapture. It was good because it used the 5-shot rule in terms of technical shooting in traditional interview format, along with computer-generated graphics, and file footage to tell a complete story, along with a number of interviews.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13487681 – BBC new clip of Libyan freedom fighters in a training camp that’s ill-prepared to fight. Interesting and good because it also uses the 5-shot rule fairly well, and it has one constant narration.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13507026 - BBC news clip of amusing hoax. I think it’s good because of the interesting cinematography. It does NOT utilize the traditional 5-shot rule, but I liked the imagery anyway, and it was appropriate for this almost farcical story.

Market Bounty

My SoundSlides project is a visual retrospective of a walk through the Pike Place Market on a spring Sunday.  My goal was to convey the mood and feel of the market, via the background noises, the images of lush produce offerings and the sheer numbers of people pressed into confined spaces, but also to offer up a sense of the ambiance created by the performers and general chatter of the vendors.

Photography challenges were few (although I had one vendor who was quite adamant in that I would only be allowed 1 photo!); mostly it was just maneuvering around people.  The only audio challenge I had was how to fit the background music into the slide show in a way that made me happy with the final outcome.

I feel like I met my goals pretty well.  As usual, I struggled with the audio – laying the tracks down and making sure that the cuts were fairly seamless, and I hadn’t intended to do any narration, and that had to change, so that was a bit of a curve-ball, but all in all, I think it conveys the feeling I was looking for.

If I had a chance to redo the assignment, I really would prefer to not have to include any narration at all.  I believe that the images and the background from the market itself really conveys what I was hoping to convey.  I also could have used a lot more photos.

Courtesy of Crown Designers

Attending Prom as a 17-year old can be traumatic.  In my mind (not actually having attended my own senior prom, but having attended the previous year’s prom as a Junior), Prom means a few things:  obligatory breakups (“What do you mean, you’re not going to go all the way?!”), much drama about how high the shoes (or the hair, or the skirt length), and endless deliberation about dinner plans, limousine services and where to go AFTER.  I was more than a little surprised to find that these days, Prom still engenders lots of discussion about skirt lengths and certainly about dinner arrangements, but a few things are different:  ALL the shoes came off (even the adults’), I saw ZERO crying (in bathrooms or anywhere else), and there was a serious dearth of limousines, too (although, given the location, they would have been a needless extravagance, and given the economy, well, ditto). 

My goals with this photo story were simple:  to preserve for myself, and my friends who attended (and those who didn’t), our last Prom.  My good friend, Principal Kathy, is retiring next month, and my own kids are well into college, so – this was it!  And what a night it was!  There were certainly challenges though, that I hadn’t considered: (1) lighting at Prom is bad (it’s dark, mostly); there’s a lot of movement (dancing); I was having fun (picture-taking was not at the forefront of my mind); and given that most of the attendees were minors, I couldn’t use their faces in my photography without obtaining permission (and really, even that wasn’t sufficient, unless they were 18). 

I love the story, and I feel like it certainly tells itself.  I felt a bit cheated only getting to use 8 slides, given there were several beautiful images that weren’t as necessary to story that I couldn’t use.  It certainly isn’t the story that I had imagined in my mind, but it’s a lovely version of it nonetheless, and it captures (for me) the simple essence of what may be the most surprising thing about this Prom:  that it was such a happy event.  Certainly, Prom should be happy, but this was a simple, joyful, easy happiness.  I felt 17 again (without the teenage angst).  That was fantastic!

If I had to do this project over again, I’m not sure I would do anything differently.  The evening was perfect, and I wouldn’t change a thing.  Maybe I would have tried to eliminate my expectations of what I expected to see at the end of it.  But I’m not sure that’s even possible.  I did the best I could with the environment, the subject-matter and the constraints we were all under.  Maybe I would have preferred to use a better camera, but I love the concept of the ubiquitous presence of my iPhone.  So, there you have it, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

1. Waiting outside the Seattle Aquarium for the doors to open seemed endless… but we managed to find some wonderful photographic opportunities in the waterfall.
2. Principal Kathy and her beau, Ron, admired the beauty of their surroundings, even as we all marvelled at the beauty of the gowns worn by the young ladies attending.
3. Of course, Prom IS a dance, so there was dancing… Lots of dancing… in large animal-like groups…
4. And when they were tired, they strolled through the aquarium to behold other wonders.
5. My guy wasn’t really into the dancing, but he looked really great.
6. The jellyfish arch provided endless photo opportunities for everyone.
7. There were plenty of moonlight-like strolls through the tunnels looking out into a watery world.
8. And of course, in the end, the shoes simply had to come off.  It was the perfect end to a perfect evening.

I also learned to make time on a daily basis to look around my world and actually SEE things.  It’s so easy for me to wake up and get ready, make my commute and place myself in front of a computer monitor for the day that sometimes I don’t SEE anything.  This was a good exercise in picking my head up and looking around.  And you know, there’s lots to see! 

It was fun.  And challenging.  And I learned a lot.

Water