New challenges bring the anxiety

Apprehension is a common feeling anytime something new is attempted.

I felt that apprehension with this week’s assignment, writing and recording a blog post. I didn’t know the first thing about making recordings and working with audio files. I even had a hard time coming up with a topic and writing a script.

So, I fell back on my training from Reporting for Mass Media. I thought about what was going on in my state of Missouri regarding student and press rights. I remembered reading that the Walter Cronkite New Voices Act had made it through committee, and was set for a vote on the Missouri House floor soon.

What better topic could a guy ask for?

Though I knew about the Act, I didn’t know that it was being sponsored by a Republican, or that there was mostly Republican support for it. This is very different from the situation when I was in high school. Most Republicans opposed the Student Freedom of Expression Bill we were trying to pass then.

Researching the Act made me realize that some of that support is suspicious. I think it may have more to do with getting back at the Concerned Student 1950 protestors on the MU campus than protecting high school journalists. That’s just a feeling I have, and I didn’t want to include that speculation in my recording.

While using Audioboom, I was a bit lost. My first recording was barely audible. I figured it might be because the built-in microphone on my Mac isn’t very good. I borrowed a microphone from our broadcast teacher, and the recording is easier to hear, but is nowhere near loud enough. I tried to play around with the levels on it, but couldn’t get it right.

I suppose one of the things I learned was that I still have a lot to learn regarding audio files.

The delivery in the podcast is a little on the dry side. I tried to vary my voice inflection, and it comes through at times, but for the most part it sounds like an NPR segment, without the volume and compelling background effects. That isn’t what I was trying to do, and I’d like to work with this more to perfect it.

I was surprised at how easy it was to embed the podcast into my blog. One of my first Google searches took me to Audioboom’s own FAQs page, and in just two sentences it perfectly outlined how embed the file. I had trouble loading my slideshow in a previous week, but this was easy. A quick copy and paste function into the HTML side of the blog, and there it was.

We have already had a lesson over how to edit audio files and splice them together, and I’m gearing up to work on that assignment. Though I like the overall topic and theme of my podcast, I’ll be happy to try my hand at something a little more complex.

Here comes all that apprehension, again.

Getting the details all wrong

Who knew there was so much to know about taking pictures?

A lot of people, probably.

I’ve never been a great detail person. I tend to look at the big picture, and view the specific details of most processes as needless minutiae, with the express purpose of annoying me. As though my time is worth too much to concentrate on the smaller details.

And details are what photography is all about.

In the past two weeks, I learned a lot about what it takes to shoot great photos. That isn’t to say I can shoot great photos, but I do have a better understanding of how to start. It really started with the realization that cameras do not record moments; they capture light. From that understanding, my own camera become more approachable.

In my high school, I do not teach the introductory journalism classes. I only advise one of the production classes. My colleague has lots of pictures hung in our room about manipulating a camera: ISO numbers, and f/stop numbers and shutter speed numbers. Numbers, numbers, numbers. I did not know what any of them meant. The sight of those numbers sent me into a flashback/nightmare about math class. I think I avoid anything related to numbers for that exact reason.

In any case, this week I learned that ignoring those numbers has worked against me. The ISO was the first number we covered in class. It just controls the camera’s sensitivity to light. The brighter it is, the lower the ISO. The darker it is, the higher the ISO. You don’t want to mess with the ISO too much after you have set it for an environment, unless it suddenly clouds over. Easy enough.

The next item I learned about was how the aperture works. The aperture, of course, is the opening in the lens, and it can be opened wide (f/4) or narrowed (f/22). The wider the opening, the more light comes in, but the more out of focus the fore- or background will appear. The narrower the opening, the less light comes in, but the fore- or background will be more in focus.

Finally, I learned about shutter speed. It works in combination with the ISO and aperture settings. The faster the shutter speed, like 1/4000 of a second, the more likely you are to freeze motion without blur. But that means the shutter is open for such a short amount of time that it can’t let much light in.

There are ways to compensate and play around with the settings, such as the rule of reciprocity (if you move the aperture four stops one way, you should move the shutter speed four stops the other way), but I’m still learning how to manipulate those.

My photo slideshow will be up for you to peruse shortly. Which brings me to what else I learned this week; don’t procrastinate when it comes to posting your work online. Because now, under the gun, I cannot for the life of me get my photo slideshow to imbed properly.