Change of Pace

So break is over and I'm back in CoMo for my last semester. The plan was to plunge right into my Master's project right away, which is a photography book based on last year's Missouri Photo Workshop that I'll be editing. Unfortunately the work-study job that will pay for my last round of tuition has ended up eating up far more time than I'd expected and I haven't done a thing yet towards starting. Hopefully that will change first thing tomorrow morning however when I plan to devote the entire day to devising a concrete project game plan.

The good news however, at least in terms of the supposed focus of this blog, is that I've done a decent job of getting my running schedule back on track. I'm running 6 miles pretty consistently 4x a week or so and as of this past weekend, I've started swimming and lifting again too. The lifting left my chest and shoulders in a state of profound discomfort but I try to tell myself that's just the feeling of the muscles getting stronger.

It's been a long, long time since I've been fast now, but that doesn't mean that I've forgotten how I got there the first time. Consistent. Slow. Distance. Emphasis on slow. I lost the strap for my heart rate monitor when I left New York in August of 2008, but I've got a shiny new one sitting on my desk right now and I'm ready to rock with it.

I'm going to be calling this "the training plan" and as I will discuss further with some of you, it goes far beyond getting a sub-3 marathon this time around. The methods are pretty much the same though. I hope to get back to running at least five days a week, between 4 and 9 miles at a pop, but always keeping my heart rate below 150. That's no easy thing for me, especially when I'm not in the greatest of shape to begin with, but I learned last time that it's in that trudgingly low hr range where all my aerobic miracles happen.

The first milepost goal will possibly com on April 3rd, with a 2.5 mi/15 mi/2.5 mi run/bike/run duathlon here in Columbia. A month later, I really want to do that same sprint triathlon that I did last year. After that I'm not making any big plans until early October, but I'll write more about that goal later.

As motivated as I am right now to stay committed to these goals, I know that life has a way of interfering. My mom's health is an ever present worry these days and I'm never sure when I'm going to have to hop a plane back to Richmond. I know I'm going to be spending a week or two out in Virginia in mid-April when my brother and his wife will be having their first baby, but of course I should be able to run while I'm there. And of course this damn Master's project has to get done. I keep joking that I don't have to graduate in May, but I should keep that date in my sights as the ideal target date for the moment anyway.

So, that's the plan. Get started on the editing project, get consistent with the running and swimming, triathlon on May 2nd, graduation on May 14th and then I'll have all summer to plan for October and start my new life in St. Louis with Jack.

This has been a long, long semester, but it's finally winding down. By Sunday I should be done, done, done. I still want to tune up my EPJ flash project before I make it public, even though I had to turn it in for a grade before it was really ready for prime time. Anyway, here is the project I turned in for picture story. It's really more of an essay than it is a story...or several mini-stories? At any rate, it's done.

As we stood at the pizza counter picking out our toppings, Jack looked over at me in my insulated camo jacket and asked if I might not want venison on my slice. He has pointed out that, after only 14 months in the state, I am now probably more Missouri than he is. ... 17-year-old Megan Perotti texts the news of her successful hunt to her friends while her father, Brad Perotti, prepares to field dress her 8-point buck, near Paris, Mo., November 14, 2009.

I did, of course, grow up in a hunting state, so all this talk of deer and ducks isn't completely foreign to me, but the last month or so has definitely provided me with far more hunting experience than I'd ever been exposed to before. My ultimate conclusion is that the sport is primarily about sitting around and waiting for something to happen. As one of my subjects observed, that is why it is called "hunting" and not "killing".

I'm nearly done with the actual picture-taking for both my picture story and electronic photojournalism (EPJ) classes, though I'm still hoping to get in one more element with a father and daughter at a local handgun shooting range. I'd also like to print out some of the images and sit down for a little photo-elicitation with each of my father/daughter pairs for the picture story project. I wish I'd figured out earlier on what my focus for that project was going to be, but this is after all a learning process, so I'm trying to not be too hard on myself. I'm still a little fuzzy on what the EPJ final project will look like, but as in each semester thus far, these things have a way of working themselves out just in the nick of time.
.... Shawna, left, and Brenna Scott participate in a Missouri Department of Conservation youth duck hunt, Oct. 31, 2009.
... Missouri Department of Conservation youth guide Jarrod Pantaleo checks the time while 12-year-old Kasay McNail waits patiently in a deer blind in hopes of seeing a deer, Oct. 31, 2009. After nearly four hours, a doe stepped into the clearing and she was able to make a clean shot.

NOMAD Photos is a Canadian photo agency cooperatively owned by four documentary photojournalists. They pursue a stated goal of highlighting “under-reported social, political, health and environmental issues worldwide.” NOMAD markets its work to a variety of clients in the arts, media and not-for-profit/non-governmental sectors. I picked their multimedia site to look at because that kind of sounds like my dream job.

Built in xhtml using CSS, the bare bones site is organized by way of a simple frame structure using a stark color scheme of black and grey.

The three stories featured on the homepage lead the visitor to a new page where they can access a commercial gallery/slideshow presentation supported by PhotoShelter.

Within the NOMAD site itself, the viewer can link to a ‘features’ page that showcases a selection of each photographers’ work. Clicking on each photographers’ name leads to another page where you can click on a thumbnail representing a photo project which leads to another page with a slideshow. The whole process is a little onerous and involves a lot of clicking around to find everything. I was also disappointed with the amount of information available about each story and the caption format was not consistent between photographers.

The NOMAD site’s ‘multimedia’ page features seven very small Quicktime MOV files. Most of these are clearly produced to advance the interests of specific NGOs in Afghanistan rather than to function as journalistic reports. They feature music soundtracks and odd little video flourishes (like page turning or spinning cube effects) that make them feel a little tacky. One of the videos is about an AIDS patient, which feels a little abruptly out of place.

All in all, the sites efforts to target any specific audience feels a little haphazard. I think it would help if there were more consistency in the presentation of each photographers work. I also get the sense that the site isn’t updated very regularly, especially since the copyright at the bottom of the page only goes through 2008.

I'm finally getting to the point where I have some rough drafts of work on my project about the growing numbers of girls who are learning to shoot. I see it as a way of looking at the next emerging generation of women and the confidence with which they carry themselves as well as a way of examining modern relationships between fathers and daughters. There are still quite a few images I'd like to replace in the slideshow, but that is going to be dependent upon getting clear weather and the ongoing patience of my subjects.I've also been haunting the 4-H shooting competitions around these parts and have met a ton of charming and talented female shooters there as well. This is my first attempt at an NPR-style radio story and it's entirely too long, but this is the result of chatting up the ladies at the state shooting contest. There's another shotgun match this coming Sunday, so my camera, recorder and I will be out there again trying to figure out what my story is.

Since this brave new world of photojournalism requires us to not only have the ability to produce beautiful, storytelling images, we tireless grad students are also devoting our days and nights to also becoming evocative writers, crack audio technicians, skilled videographers and finally, computer programming whizzes as well. Today's entry for the cause of a class is about the merits and shortcomings of a multimedia piece produced on the St Petersburg Times' website marking the 50th Anniversary of the Barbie doll.It's not exactly hard news, but it's an interesting example of how to tell a simple story using photographs, textual information, reader feedback and Flash animation.

There's not a ton of information included in this project, but it does feel like a playful use of the tools available and after all, it is a news piece about a toy, so that is as it should be. It's colorful (PINK!) and fun and suits the subject matter perfectly. The interactive bits seem to work smoothly and the navigation is intuitive, though again, the actual facts that were presented felt a bit sparse.
The three major features include:

• An interactive screen showing an array of dolls from the past that the viewer can click on to find out more about the cultural influence that determined the look of that doll and its clothing style.
• A somewhat superfluous feature that allows you to find out what human celebrities are also turning 50 this year -- this screen also provides some clickable links to find out what Barbie might do to age a little more gracefully.
• An audio slideshow from a Barbie fashion show at this year's New York fashion week. The audio is simply a repetitive track of techno music.

The project looks like it was fun to make and it really does suit the subject matter well. I guess it sort of functions as brain candy more than it does news in this case, but I do think it's a good example of simple, well-planned interactive design.

I needed to briefly review another photographer’s website for a class assignment, so I looked at St. Louis photographer (and fellow Mizzou alum) Sarah Conard’s professional site. She uses a simple, clean flash interface to introduce her site with a looping 5-picture slideshow featuring images that represent her work in sports, music, food, news and feature photography.The user can easily exit this short presentation at any time by clicking a simple list of links to the left of the page. These links lead to galleries and slideshows for those same categories, combining news and feature in to one genre called “Life” and adding options to also peruse portraits, audio slideshows and recent work. Visitors can also see biographical and resume information for Conard and may link to a separate PhotoShelter site to purchase and license images. The images selected for display here are strong and do a good job of showcasing the versatility of this photographer.

The site appears to use a CSS/Flash template stored on a server named lightgalleries.net , but there isn’t a publically accessible website with that name, so I couldn’t get much more information than that. It’s very user friendly and simple to navigate, but it doesn’t seem to leave any room to showcase the photographer’s image or personality. Or if it does, this particular photographer has not chose to do so. In addition to rendering her someone anonymous, the limited about of text within the site may also hurt Conard's searchability. Including a link to an integrated blog on that left side might help her include more searchable information in a way that doesn't interfere with the clean, efficient look of the site.

Despite a full set of Craftsman wrenches being thrown into the works of this year's Missouri Photo Workshop, we pulled into town and started setting up the workspace just before midnight on Saturday. That even gave us an hour to check out one of the local drinking spots, the Bull Pen. Not that we could linger there even long enough to hear Jakob sing karaoke. As soon as the two weddings at our hotel were over with, we started dodging drunk party lingerers with boxes and equipment. Too bad we couldn't get the bridal parties to help out.

I joined a couple of the volunteers on a run this morning and checked out Crystal City a little bit from a pedestrian point of view. I regretted not bringing my point and shoot along and vaguely recall having the same regret for last year's MPW in St. James. At least none of the Festus/Crystal City dogs seem to have a taste for runners, though perhaps they just have better fences and chains here than they did in St. James.

I heard tell that there's an early morning running group here like there is in Columbia, but since it's already past 1 here, I'm unlikely to look into that as a story idea tomorrow. It's something to follow up with though, as a possible element for the MPW book. I probably won't even run tomorrow at all, though I'm hoping to go Thursday with two possible goals in mind. 1. To find a path or road that leads down to the Mississippi River and 2. To plot a course that will actually spell out "MPW 61." It's a super-dorky tech oriented runner thing to do, but still, I'm amused by the idea of it. For what it's worth, today's run didn't spell anything.