Week 3

Welcome back to my blog. As my project progresses, I'm finding it increasingly more difficult to juggle all of my work along with my personal life, but I've decided that this is preparing me for the real world when I go on to university and get a proper job. It's not that I don't enjoy my work because it's always super fun to go out there and apply my skills to the tasks at hand, it's just that I didn't expect to be struggling to find a balance. However, I am so glad that this week has been a slow one. Here's what I've been up to this week!

Sunday: I made an arrangement with Luke Wohlford, one of my photographic subjects, to document his time at Catalina United Methodist Youth Group. Luke is very dedicated to this youth group; whenever he's available to attend, he does. It was my first time attending something of this religious nature and overall, I was actually surprised by how much I enjoyed my time. Richard Jones, the guy who runs the group, was super cool with my attending and it turns out that I had actually met him before at a BASIS sports event so it was cool to feel comfortable there. I also encountered some of my friends who attend the group whenever they can. Some of the things that happened included playing games, eating dinner, getting to know one another and also a religious lesson. It was incredibly casual and not at all forced and I enjoyed it. I look forward to returning more often and learning about the religion and the youth group as a whole and it's impact. Unfortunately, I didn't conduct any interviews with Luke or Richard about the doctrine of the church or anything of that nature, but I'm okay with that because it just gives me an excuse to return (not that I needed one in the first place!). However, one of the things I did take away was intended as a joke from Luke during the dinner, but I took seriously: This is a very supportive place, so if you can't say something supportive then don't be here.

Thursday: Jonathan, Jeff and I went up to the ostrich farm again to start filming for his movie. We filmed portions of the lorikeets, the goats, the ostriches and the monster truck. My job was to make sure the recording device was placed properly under the camera and that the audio levels were correctly measured, to place editing markers in the overlapping sections of the cameras and to dust off the lenses after each location. I was so worried that I would screw something up or get in the way, but ultimately it was a fun time. The animals and people were well prepared and everything went well. Afterwards, we took the entire cast out to lunch at Dairy Queen and it was even better getting a chance to talk to the parents and getting to know their personalities outside of the film.

One thing I've learned about filming with Jonathan is that the technology is made in such a way that it's hard to hide something undesirable in the shot, whereas filming with one camera, it's a lot easier to frame the shot so that you can hide something undesirable. Also, Jonathan is able to control his subjects and create his desired shot. Since I'm focusing on documentary photography, it's sort of an unwritten rule that I can't control the subjects and I just have to capture the action and the mood. All of this makes way for a topic of "truth" in photography which has been a site for controversy in many aspects, but I'm not quite sure if I'm going to discuss that in my presentation or how I'm going to approach the topic.

Hopefully next week I'll start to get some decent pictures in my camera roll!