On Monday, February 29, our media storytelling lecture class talked about our next assignment due March 7. Our assignment is a photo essay consists of finding a newsworthy event, feature or profile. The assignment includes 10 photos with a 150-word article detailing who is in the photo, the story, and the event. After our professors gave us an overview of our assignments due the following week, we then moved on to our guest speaker Chris Machian.
Chris Machian is a professional photographer and took up photography in high school. He then worked as a photographer for the Gateway at UNO and worked for USA Today. Chris has done photography work for various newspapers and new networks. His works can be seen in The Omaha World Herald, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and my personal favorite, The Onion.
For our class, Chris gave us a presentation about the basics of news photography. Throughout Chris’ presentation, he showed us incredible examples of his photography works like photos that show the aftermath of a town being hit by a tornado, sport event at stadiums from the Ralston arena, TD Ameritrade park and Golf courses.
Chris says that the goal of new photography is to tell the story with photos. Some of the very important things Chris mentioned in his presentation about news photography are the types of photos used in news photography, there are three types of photos The tight detail shot which show detail but doesn’t give the whole story, the medium shot which is the typical photograph, and the wide shot which is a a shot that people struggle with the most to capture.
Other things that Chris says we need to consider in capturing a photo is the background, the lighting, lens choice, and layers. He also mentioned that captions are also important in photographs because they must have information about the people, location, and event. Chris then finished his presentation with very useful information, he says that journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed and that everything else is public relations.
He says it’s important to minimize harm and that ethical journalism treats sources, subjects, colleagues and members of the public as human beings deserving of respect.
Chris Clines Music and Gear 