Admittedly this last year of University has been tough for me as I fell out of enjoyment with the course and have been in a bit of a slump at times due to other aspects of my life as well. I do realise that this is no excuse so I will be using my week 8 task as a reflection on what I had gotten done before the module deadline.
Weeks 8, 9 & 10 consisted of me getting my photos together before I did my writing, as I already had my story in mind and quotes from Ruben Forde. The toughest part about gathering these photos was the editing and making them look professional. I used two types of camera throughout this process, mainly my iPhone for the ‘street’ photos and then my flatmates camera for the in-game shots which were placed towards the end of my story when I was talking about Ruben’s university basketball career as I felt as though they were appropriate for that part of the story.
The street photos originally came out to be quite average, however through the use of my experience with photo editing I was able to tweak the photos to look more professional and cleaner as they originally lacked composition and detail. Once I had edited the iPhone images, they looked a lot clearer, and to do this I ensured that there was more focus on Ruben and some of the images lacked colour so I enhanced the contrasting colours so that the image stood out more.
The image above was my favourite one once I had done editing. In my article it is placed when I am talking about Ruben’s relationship with God, and I believe that once I was able to edit the photo so that the light was brighter, it came out really well and almost appeared as a metaphor having the light shining down on Rueben whilst he is playing basketball on the streets, where he started.
The image above was disappointing, this was at a training session and was taken as I was trying to learn how to use the camera. The original shot was good however I accidentally took it in portrait mode rather than landscape. Therefore I had to crop it which took a lot of quality out of the image. As well as this, I struggled with the focus so the image came out quite blurry, and trying to edit that proved to be difficult as you can see, I wasn’t able to make it as clean as I would’ve liked.
I overcame these challenges once I was shown how to use the camera and through some more practise at home I was able to learn what settings would be best to shoot in for sports photography at their game. I still struggles slightly however I was able to get a few great shots during their game vs York by using the camera settings to my advantage. I was able to use a fast shutter speed to freeze the action of Ruben jumping and running as well as the ball bouncing. As well as this I used a wider aperture to let in more light and create a shallower depth to focus more on Ruben. As it was indoor, I used a higher ISO to maintain the shutter speed in low light. Despite only having a few photos that came out this good, I was very happy with how they looked.
Overall, I wish that I had been better prepared for this module and I regret letting my personal life get in the way of my education too much. I am still somewhat pleased with what I produced and I am still glad to have taken this module as I have learned some fascinating skills along the way that I will have for life.
Photographic Journalism 
You must be logged in to post a comment.