Walking Around With A Camera

The process of walking around with a camera was certainly something interesting, but not entirely new to me. When I was in high school, I used to be the one walking around with the video camera filming everyone else. The more time that you spend behind the camera and getting over the fear that people really do not want you aiming at them, the process gets pretty easy. I actually enjoy being the one behind the action, especially on a video camera
There were a couple things that I thought worked well when I was taking the pictures. When I first started out to take the pictures, I really liked the amount of sunlight that was left. It was when the sun was just about to go down, but there was still enough light on things to where the flash did not reach. It gave many of the pictures a cool effect with the darker light in the background of the pictures. The shots in the "woods" looked a lot better than they did in a brighter light.
However my late start which first produced positive results quickly brought upon my eminent demise. The great light before sunset quickly turned into no light at all. This lack of prominent sunlight lead to many good looking shots not having quite the amount of beauty as the picture looked in the viewfinder. This was due to the fact that the flash only carries a certain distance, leaving the areas it did not reach too dark for viewing.

For some reason I can't seem to get my photobucket account on slideshow to work. I am thinking the site might be down, so for now if it is not working, here is a link.

http://s409.photobucket.com/albums/pp176/snapperproject/

My Multimedia Project

For my multimedia report, I was considering doing it on the town/gown relationships between the University of New Hampshire and the town of Durham. According to this years Princeton Review rankings, the University of New Hampshire was ranked number six on the most strained town gown relationships. I think that this story could certainly lend itself to a multimedia approach. The “who” of the story is very expansive. I could cover everyone from the Durham Town Council, UNH Administrators, policemen and women who monitor the relationships between the town and students, alumni to see if they felt there was a problem when they were on campus, residents of the town, and business owners of the area. “What” I could to present the story in a multimedia format would be a combination of still pictures, voice recordings of people that I have interviewed, filming other interviews to mix in within the still pictures and my own voice recording to narrative the video. The “where” of this story is evidently obvious. I would have to interview people all around Durham because that is where the heart of the story takes place. Within Durham, I could find almost all of the necessary elements to create this multimedia story. The “when” of the story seems to be the one that is the most pressing. These rankings did come out this summer, which makes the story seem a little out dated, however the story is not that the University of New Hampshire ranked so high on the relationships being strained. The story is what the town and the university are doing to solve the problem. I have already spoken with a few members of the Durham Town Council, and they are in talks with the university right now to help rectify the situation. This seems to me as the much more pressing story, rather than the fact that the university was ranked. Lastly the “how” of the story will be through many of the methods that I have already talked about. This includes interviews, pictures, video, and voice. But why is this story important? So what? Why does it matter that the relationships are strained? It is important because it is something that is relatively unheard of. College students are forced fed university food, books, services and other aspects that are made almost entirely tax free, while the town provides many of the same while having to make up for the taxes that UNH does not pay. We as students should realize just that, that we are only a small part of the town of Durham. We should care about the people who make up the town. Without them, there are no bars downtown, no Wings Your Way, no Kurt’s Lunchbox, which leaves everything entirely run by the college. The downtown, granted small, are what draws many of the students to the University. Without this, we lose the essence of everything we love about Durham, the ability for the town of Durham and the University of New Hampshire to exist as one unified entity. That is why this is important.

The New Newspaper is Old News

In the interest of full disclosure, I haven't read the newspaper in years. Everything that I feel is necessary can be found online. Its not that I don't find it useful or enjoy reading the paper, it is just that the paper is at such a disadvantage to online media. The cost to print one color picture in the newspaper trumps putting an infinite amount of digital photos on the web. The paper is restricted to one or two colored pictures that epitomize the story, but digital media can display everything, even allowing just the pictures themselves to tell the whole story. The idea of pictures telling the whole story is something that could never happen in print. Also, the newspaper is restricted to covering things that happen before midnight. Anything that you are reading in the paper has already been covered by six different writers in six different angles online. By 6 am when the paper has shown up at your door, you already know more about the story they are covering than the person who wrote it for the paper. For example, when the police were finally starting to break the Clark Rockefeller case and find out about his identity, the Union Leader was still reporting stuff that I had read the previous two days. I thought news was supposed to be timely? My biggest dissent from the newspaper however, comes from the amount of content restrictions. In the paper, everything, besides the editorials and select columnists, is middle of the road, dry, censored and polite. All the reporters follow the same basic rules, and use similar tools to tell the same stories. There is no arguing, hostility, or any controversial view points. That is what I LOVE the most about the internet. People writing their own blogs, or running their own websites are free to display whatever content they please. I could write here that I hate the President and think that Paris Hilton would do a better job. I don't have to worry about getting at ends with the editors of the paper or offending corporate sponsors. I write what I want to write. This is the American ideal of freedom of speech at its roots. I can write my ideas of my views of my America, and not have to worry about YOUR politics.

First Post

There are a very select number of blogs that I can actually read. And by very select, I mean there are maybe two types of blogs that I can stand without feeling like Jerry Springer on a "Why won't anybody love me" Wednesday. Whenever I actually took the time to sit down and read someones personal feelings, it almost always appears to me as a whiny attempt for someone to make people feel bad for themselves. "Hey none of the people that actually know me in my own life want to be my friend, so you, who I have only met over a broadband connection should be." However, there are other (Thank God) types of blogs or bloggers besides those people (I like to call them wet keyboarders). Many of the larger newspapers in this nation have started to add blogs for their writers, and most of them are a far cry from xxrandomgothfreakxx's blog, who is still complaining that no girls want to go out with him and that he has dreams of setting his cat on fire. The Boston Herald now has bloggers that focus on the Sox, Pats, Celts and Bruins, that give up to date information on what is going on in vast world of Boston area sports. So instead of waiting until tomorrow to find out why the hell Dustin Pedroia is hitting cleanup, we are kept up to date letting us know that Kevin Youkilis is having back spasms. See, that kind of blogging is actually useful. We are provided with some sort of basic information and don't have to wait until tomorrows newspaper. This example shows one of the best uses for something like a blog, providing information to a person in a short period of time. But interestingly enough, in my first blog entry, I did not provide any sort of useful information. Instead I just complained and wined like the people I was complaining about myself.