Change of Pace

My tuition for this semester is being waived by the kind folks at the University of Missouri in exchange for my working as the coordinator for this year's Missouri Photo Workshop. The 61st annual workshop is being held in the town of Festus this year, which is historically and physically intertwined with another town, Crystal City, so for all practical purposes the workshop in really in the Twin City consisting of both communities.
Darby's got a lot to deal with since his grandmother died in a car crash and a new stepfather is coming into his life, but right now he doesn't care at all because he just got his very own puppy.

Since I probably won't venture far from the workshop headquarters one the event has actually begun, I took the opportunity last weekend to explore the Twin City area and even take a few pictures. The people were super nice, which is good, because it's still an awfully stressful thing, this business of trying to see what the story really is and choosing the right aperture and make sure there's not a flag pole sticking up behind your subject's head and making sure your white balance is correct and that the cat didn't lick the back of your lens and that the same lens doesn't show up in the background of your photograph. Whew.
Every star had to start somewhere, so why shouldn't Mallori take the stage in the Twin City Days talent show. Country music trumps pre-teen pop in these parts, so she only ended up with third place, but the 14-year-old just seemed happy to get the chance sing for the people.

The St. Louis dining guide Sauce Magazine gives a notable amount of space to photography and the visuals often transcend straight food product shots. This review looks into whether the magazine’s website maintains the same commitment to visuals.

Saucemagazine.com has a simple modular design that gives spatial priority to the current issue by rotating several images from the magazine. The images aren’t gigantic, but given that the page is mostly text based they are a prominent feature of the home page.

The site utilizes two ways of featuring photographs on specific article pages: as small embedded photos that can be clicked on to scroll through several images or one small image that links to a new page showcasing all the images from the story, with an option to enlarge this slideshow to full screen. Caption information is briefly revealed for each image, but photographer credits are only given on the main page. The slideshows work well and have good user controls, but it would be nice if the articles with the smaller embedded images gave the user the option to see larger versions of those photographs. The main page might also feature a dedicated link to the available slideshows.

The site places greater emphasis on multimedia pieces, most of which are slickly produced lifestyle video and podcast segments, but also includes clips from local restaurants and user submissions. Some of the video seems oddly compressed, with uncomfortably narrow proportions. The option to upload videos is nice, however only one user has contributed so far and the quality of those three clips is poor.

Finally, the site includes a nice interactive restaurant search function that is probably one of the primary motivations for users to gravitate to saucemagazine.com in the first place.

Now that we’re a few weeks into the semester it’s starting to get harder to find the time to run and I’ve been reduced to joining the early morning runners on Tuesdays and Thursdays to cobble together 15 miles of very rudimentary fitness maintenance. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that the situation will improve once the big photo workshop is over and that distraction is gone from my plate.

Despite my current preoccupation with procuring office supplies, worrying over the fabric quality of the t-shirts I already ordered and making sure all of the workshop volunteers have rides to Festus, it’s already time to also start piecing together ideas for the final photo projects that will quickly take the place of the workshop in my anxious psyche once that event has been put to bed.

So briefly, one of the topics that has interested me since moving out to Missouri is the vast chasm between the conventional wisdom surrounding the idea of gun ownership between my neighbors and co-workers in New York and the average citizen voter out here in the heartland. The difference are pretty stark and the two sides’ most significant common ground seems to lie in the fear and animosity that each group bears to the other. The stereotypical urban aesthete looks west (or east, if you happen to live in L.A.) and sees a bunch of hillbillies and paranoid extremists who only bother to leave their walled compounds in order to get their kicks from killing Bambi. On the other hand, the salt-of-the-earth, God-fearing hunting crowd openly wonders about how patriotic the liberal crowd can possibly be when they have so little respect for the second amendment.

I don’t plan on taking sides in the debate, but I think it might be interesting to look at the issue through the eyes of young women who are drawn to the shooting sports. It’s harder for anti-gun proponents to stereotype girls in the same ways that they might boys or men since it’s harder to label them as inherently violent or blood thirsty.

At the same time, even here in Bass Pro land it’s considered perfectly acceptable for young women to take less interest in guns and hunting than their male peers, so it might be perhaps more of a considered choice on their part to want to learn about firearms and shooting in the first place. Also, as a woman, I simply find I have a natural interest in talking to other women about their lives and the different choices they make regarding how they choose to live them.

This is a topic I could pursue as either an extended story or essay for my picture story class and develop even further using multimedia for my electronic photojournalism class. I’ve already done some research on the topic by attending the Professional Outdoor Media Association’s conference in August, where I was struck by how many of the vendors were prominently targeting women with their products and promotional materials.

Possible facets that could be featured on a multimedia site include:

• Girls competing at the 4-H State Shooting Sports contest (I’ve already collected pictures and audio for this)
  
• A 7-year-old in Centralia learning how to shoot her first bb-gun
  
• Two 11-year-old girls that will be hunting this fall, one with a gun, the other with a bow
  
• Statistics on numbers of girls getting into shooting, either from NRA, 4-H or another organization.
  
• I’d like to feature an opposing point of view as well, maybe a young woman who has had a negative experience with firearms, to hear her point of view on gun control.

It’s still pretty early in my thinking process on this topic, but the more conversations I have on the subject, the more inclined I am to continue pursuing it.

The assignment here was to efficiently tell a story in 4-6 photos, using different camera lenses and angles for image variety. We also kept in mind the storytelling purpose of each photograph (i.e. opener, scene-setter, portrait, emotion, interaction, detail, closer).
This is the story of Darby's first puppy.

A child holds a puppy from a litter belonging to Desoto, Mo. residents Bob and Amy Petschonek on Sept. 12, 2009. The Petschoneks set up a pen of newly weaned yellow labrador puppies on the edge of the Twin City Days dog show in Crystal City, Mo. knowing that the event would likely draw a crowd of animal lovers and potential customers.

Phil Biermann signs a check for the purchase of a puppy for his fiancee Rena Campbell's 13-year-old son, Darby Fenger, while Campbell, far right, speaks with Amy Petschonek about the dog's lineage.

Rena Campbell lifts a six-week-old puppy into the eager arms of her son, Darby Fenger. Darby tentatively decided to name the dog Diogi,"because that's what it sounds like when you spell dog out loud."

Festus seveth-grader Darby Fenger holds his puppy Diogi on his shoulder like a baby as he and his mother, Rena Campbell, walk past the Twin City Days antique car and tractor show on Main Street in Festus, Mo., Sept. 12, 2009. Fenger and Campbell were on their way to purchase a collar, a leash and a crate for their new yellow labrador.

13-year-old Darby Fenger closes his eyes for a few minutes and rests his head on his sleepy new puppy, Diogi. Fenger had just lashed out in anger at his friend Brandon for touching some of his late grandmother's collectable Coca-Cola bottles, ordering him to get out of his room. Darby still gets very sad when he thinks about his grandmother, who died just over a year ago in a car accident. "She was like another mom to me," he says.

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.

By the time the photographers started wandering in for registration on Sunday, the place looked as if we'd been there for two days already. All in all, it's gone pretty smoothly. Most of the participants have their story ideas approved now, though there are still a few wild-eyed photographers who are starting to look pretty panicked. Makes me feel happy to be on the organizational side of things.

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.