My internship ended on August 12th. Scott arrived that same day. We proceeded to go on vacation to the Olympic Peninsula. And now we’re home.

There are so many things I need [want] to post from my last few weeks in Seattle. Now that I’m home, I’ll start posting these projects and adventures here. I needed some time to process the entire West Coast experience. It was brilliantly amazing, and I am so thankful to all who helped me learn so much in such a short amount of time.

Seattle, you will always hold a special place in my heart – where it’s 75º and sunny every day.

1. I met the President and First Lady. There’s video here of my friends and I getting honored at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.

2. I walked in graduation. I am steps (well, words) away from my master’s degree from the University of Missouri.

During the last week of my internship with NPR, I got to photograph a story with Larry Abramson, NPR’s education correspondent. We spent the day with Fairfax County eighth graders participating in Junior Achievement’s Finance Park program as part of a series on financial literacy and young people. This was the first real story I got to cover for NPR, and it was an awesome experience.

My favorite photograph from the day made it into the story page, and to my surprise (and delight), on the homepage for a few hours. For those of you familiar with the impact of running a photograph above the fold on 1A in a print edition, having a photograph appear in the photo lede spot on NPR’s homepage holds the same weight. Coburn Dukehart, one of my coworkers at NPR, alerted me to the story’s position on the site and sent me this screenshot, which was good since my internet hadn’t been working all day.

And yes, I forwarded this directly to my mom. She was excited, to say the least.

The NPPA Student Quarterly Clip Contest results were announced today.

“Of House and Home” won 3rd place in Multimedia.

Amazing. Really, really amazing.

And thank you to the judges, too. It’s nice to read / hear some of the reasoning why a particular photo or story won in a category. I’m pleased to see that my love for this story and connection with my awesome subject was visible to them, too. Here’s the [edited] comment about my story.

Judges’ comments for the category

We were very impressed with several of the entries, although two stood out above the others. After the first two places were decided, we had a difficult choice for third place. [...] Third place was a tougher call, but it won based on the depth of connection to the subject and the intimacy achieved in both the visuals and the audio. This is a tough story to cover, and the photographer found an excellent subject and stayed with her.

Peter Southwick, Associate Professor of Journalism and director of the photojournalism program, Boston University
Joe Lippincott, adjunct professor of journalism, Boston University
Dominick Reuter, freelance photographer and director of technology for photojournalism, Boston University

Thank you.

Being sick for five days really puts a damper on sharing awesome things here. On Thursday last week, my story with Sheila Durnil, “Of House and Home,” was published on Vox magazine’s website as part of a larger feature on foreclosure.

http://www.voxmagazine.com/stories/2011/02/10/house-and-home/

It may not have been a large part of the feature, but it got out there. And if even just one person sees this issue and realizes they can save their home before it’s too late, then our objective has been fulfilled.

It’s not just a house. It’s a home.

It’s amazing how fast time flies by, even as the days feel like they’ll never end.

A year and a half ago, I packed up my life (and Scott’s, too) and moved to Columbia, Missouri to embark on a brilliant adventure called grad school. Little did I know how attached I had grown to our comfy apartment and to spending hours on end in the photo lab (and Missourian, for that matter).

Perhaps it wasn’t the structures that felt like home, but the people contained within.

We’ve arrived in Arlington, and I’m quickly realizing how disconnected I feel right now from that camaraderie I was enjoying just weeks earlier. My brain is still in grad school mode, caring more about journalism, photo nerdery and finishing my degree than what most of the people I see around me are caring about. I almost feel like I’m not quite ready for the real world, not quite done incubating.

Good thing my internship at NPR starts on the 10th of January, and the Washington program shortly thereafter. It’s time to learn to fly on my own!

Welcome home.

This is the audio and picture version of my final project story titled:
Of House and Home: Sheila Durnil’s journey through heartache and hope.

Please pardon the toning on the images at the moment – Final Cut Express decided to ignore the hours of toning I spent earlier to make the photos look perfect. I’ll be revising this file once I figure out how to correct the color.

You’re not seeing double. I’m reposting this with a slight re-edit of the images for class. I haven’t looked at this story in a while, and I do think that this edit is a bit stronger. (And who can resist a neon-yellow horse cake? Really!)

Sophomore Tanner Brundage looks for his mother’s car on Sept. 16, 2010 outside of Jefferson City High School in Jefferson City, Mo. This was the last time his mother needed to pick him up at the end of the day, as today was his 16th birthday. Immediately after school, he took and passed his driver’s test.

While typical high school boys are involved with the traditional team sports offered by their school, such as football or baseball, Tanner competes in team roping for Missouri High School Rodeo and cowboy mounted shooting with Show Me Mounted Shooters. He began riding horses almost four years ago, and discovered roping after some of his riding friends started lessons with Mark Jobe, a roping instructor in Jefferson City. Many of the teens who compete in Missouri High School Rodeo grew up in rodeo families, but Tanner’s family has only recently been involved. “We’re kinda the rarity,” his mother Kim said. “We’re not the only ones, but most have been doing this forever.”

After spending the afternoon competing about six inches of mud, Tanner takes a hose to clean off the tack on his 12-year old horse, Cochise. His friend and neighbor Macy Randolph, 13, patiently waits for her turn, as her earlier attempts to gain control of the hose led to Tanner dousing her with water. While high school rodeo is not an organized team sport, many of the teens in the Jefferson City area practice together.

Gary Kueffer, right, holds tight onto the rope around the calf’s horns while Tanner attempts to catch its heels during an open team roping session at a small family rodeo on Saturday, Sept. 11 outside of Vienna, Mo. The open event allows combined teams of varying ages, letting teenagers compete with the more seasoned adults. Tanner prefers to compete as a heeler, which he says is the more challenging position in roping. He said that according to Mark Jobe, Tanner’s instructor, “You need to be a better roper for the heels, and a better horseman for the head.”

In honor of Tanner’s 16th birthday, his mother Kim ordered a cake made out of cupcakes to bring to roping practice on Thursday, Sept. 16, 2010. “It’s supposed to be his horse,” she said about the conspicuously bright depiction of Cochise.

Heeding comments in class and from my instructor, Rita Reed, I’ve re-edited my profile on Kelly Schultz, previously a candidate for the 21st District of the Missouri House of Representatives. I say previously since the project was photographed before the election. Sadly, she didn’t win.

In any case, here’s the revised version, which I am much happier to share on my blog.

A PSA for all my photojournalism friends writing theses this coming semester:

Please do not turn your thesis into a book unless it’s got unicorns and rainbows in it.

While I appreciate the hard work in researching and writing a thesis, academic writing does not make for a riveting read. Loup Langton, if you’re out there, many apologies. The work is thorough and excellent, but it’s really hard for me to write a blog post reaction to a very extensive academic chapter on the history of photojournalism. I feel like these reactions are to be something that maybe clicks in our heads that make us realize “oh! so that’s why I feel this way when XX happens” or “glad I’m not the only one who does XX.” With this chapter, I felt like I was being inundated with the entire history of photojournalism in just 30 pages.

There were some key points I flagged, including the importance of technology that pops up in almost every age of photojournalism. Boiling the history into one congruent chapter made the discussion of technology appear as a thread to tie all of the different events and changes together. From wet plates to flash bulbs to color film and eventually digital, technology was either the result or the cause for some major changes in the history of photojournalism.

I also took note of the addition of women and minorities into the field, which in comparison to most other changes, only happened very recently. I thank my predecessors for paving the way for kids like me to get into this industry and stand toe to toe with male tradition. Even today, I’ll find myself covering a sporting event and find that I’m the only woman photojournalist on the field or court. (In full disclosure, I named the new laptop I bought for graduate school ‘Margaret’ in honor of Margaret Bourke-White.)

Speaking of Ms. Margaret, I learned something I did not know when reading Chapnick’s chapter on the photographic essay. I knew she was considered the first woman photojournalist, but I did not know that it is believed she published the first true photographic essay. Granted, the photos are not what Chapnick considers documentary by modern definitions, but still, it seems as though the intent was there.

I thought this chapter was going to be very much like Langton’s, recounting historical photographers whom have been studied to extreme lengths, but the last page or so held a nice surprise. While not exclusive or exhaustive, I really appreciate the list of attributes for a successful photographic essay or story. Not every story needs to have every one of these, but to see the basic tenets of storytelling in one place is nice. I may write this list out more simply and put it on my wall.

Chapnick ended with a statement that I think has a strange choice in words.

“The serious photojournalist cannot afford to ignore this photojournalistic format if he or she aspires to prominence through publication in either magazines or newspapers of the world or, in that most perfect vehicle for individual statements on larger issues, photographically oriented books.” (p. 38)

Yes, on one hand. But not all of us want to be ‘prominent.’ If my name doesn’t end up in a history chapter written by people like Langton or Chapnick, that’s fine by me. I just want to share and record life, with the hope that my photographs help others in ways otherwise unreachable.