Like Record photographer Clifford Oto, I was inspired by the clouds that marked the skies around San Joaquin County this week. Unlike Cliff, however, I lack skill with a camera. I’m still learning.
After I left the gym Thursday and Friday morning I spent a few minutes taking test photos of the sky in downtown Stockton as seen looking east on Main Street from Hunter Square. Most of the photos I shot Thursday looked like this.
An ideal news article has three elements: Text, photos and multimedia features. Over the past few years I’ve been working to put together a toolkit that would allow me to produce each of those elements for Recordnet.com and The Record.
The first item in the kit was a MacBook Pro for writing text while out of the office, if necessary. Then a Pentax K200 digital camera was added for taking photos. This Christmas I was able to complete the kit with a Flip HD camera for multimedia.
My first test of the kit came Jan. 5, when I brought my cameras to the Andrew Jackson Jihad concert at the Plea for Peace Center in Stockton. It resulted in a blog about weeknight entertainment in the city that you can find here.
I discovered that producing the text and video for the blog was relatively easy, as I have experience with both. Taking photos, however, was a challenge that involved making a complicated connection between the light, the subject and the technology of the camera. It’s as much of an art as it is a science, and it gave me additional respect for the great news photogs I know and admire.
I’ve become rather bored with journalism industry news and blogs lately. There’s really nothing new out there, just more paywall this, mobile that, blah blah blah. It’s led me to take a brief hiatus from this blog to work on some other projects.
My biggest undertaking was Recordnet.com’s interactive snowglobe, which launched two weeks ago and can be found at www.recordnet.com/snowglobe.
The project allowed me to utilize the Flint Particle System snow example in a fun, user-friendly way. I also learned more about Tweens, masks and the addChild function in Actionscript 3.0.
I posted some additional items from Recordnet.com’s recent interactive tour of the new San Joaquin County administration building on Recordnet’s online blog; I thought I’d link to them here as well.
