My Experiences with Photojournalism!

Aloha friends and welcome (back) to my website! :)

I’m back with another photography portfolio post! This time, I’m going to be discussing and showcasing photojournalism.

First of all, what is photojournalism? Photojournalism is an unbiased and natural style of photography. When I say “natural” I mean typically the images captured within photojournalism are not posed or planned, just taken at the moment. In my experience, photojournalistic work includes the responsibilities of a class historian, for example; their job is to document what’s happening, while it’s happening, through photography. That is essentially what a photojournalist's job is.

I bring up photojournalism because I captured my school’s homecoming events in a photojournalistic style. This school year’s homecoming, I feel, constitutes as my first real homecoming experience. Due to Covid, my experiences with homecoming in the years prior haven’t been as “full-on” or “all-out”; everything had sort of been on the “down-low”. However, with Covid restrictions lessening, my school decided to bring back the majority of its homecoming events. Thankfully, I was able to capture some of these events, which I will be sharing with you, today.

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The Planning:

There were two main homecoming events that I was able to attend and get the best quality images for - our school’s homecoming football game and a class cheer competition -, as well as two other events that I got some “okay” photos of - class vs. class volleyball tournament and homecoming spirit week dress up days. When planning to take photos of my school’s homecoming experience, I wanted to focus the majority of my attention on capturing photos from the volleyball tournament and the dress-up days. However, due to outside circumstances, I was not able to focus too much on those two events. Thankfully, I was able to “compensate” for this by attending two other homecoming events and capturing what I feel are some good shots.

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The Results:

The first set of images I’d like to share is from my school’s homecoming cheer competition. For this event, each grade level (class) comes up with their own class cheer pertaining to that year’s homecoming theme and performs it at lunch with at least 10% of their class population during homecoming week. The order in which the cheers are performed is chosen through random selection. I was able to get photos from each class apart from my own as I was participating in my class’ cheer.

When taking these photos, I pretty much stayed in the same spot in front of the performance area. However, instead of focusing on each class as a whole all the time, I tried to zoom in on the students who were putting a lot of emotion into it.

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This second set of images I’m sharing is from my school’s homecoming football game. I got various photos from the junior varsity game, varsity game, cheerleaders, and color guard from that night. I actually found it really fun to take photos of a football game! I haven’t been able to do sports photography, before, but I think it’s something that I really enjoy and definitely want to do more of!

When arriving at the junior varsity game, I stuck with some other students who have taken photos of football games before for fun or for our school’s newspaper class, to learn more about what I could do, which helped me feel more at ease. Something that was different for me, however, was that I realized auto-focus takes too long to take action photos. I had to work with manual focus for essentially the first time - I’ve used manual focus before, but not during the entire timespan of taking photos. When taking the photos, I just rotated positions on the track around our football field. Most of the time, I was trying to stay around or behind the end-zone area where my school’s team was running towards. However, I did also try to get some photos of the two football teams lined up, about to start the play; essentially “the calm before the storm”.

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If I were to go back to homecoming week and shoot photos again as a photojournalist, I would try to take more photos of the action-filled events. Something I enjoyed from this experience was being able to use a bigger zoom lens, and I’ve discovered that I like the way the photos turn out with such a lens. However, I am proud of the photos I was able to shoot and hope to do more photojournalistic type work in the future.

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Thank you for taking the time to read this post! If you like what you read/saw, please be sure to check out some of my other posts!

I am honored to be taking you along on my photography journey! I hope you stay safe and have a wonderful day. Much aloha!

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