(This is my second blog entry for my fall semester J2150 class.)
About a week ago, I completed one of my first assignments for my J2150 class, Humans of Columbia. Being an enormous fan of the Facebook page Humans of New York and photographer Brandon Stanton, I was excited to do this project, but it was definitely a huge learning experience for me. Not only did I have to approach random strangers while walking through downtown Columbia and ask them questions, I was also required to employ my very limited camera knowledge very quickly as I tried to get three decent shots of these busy people before they decided it was time for me to move on.
Though the project was pretty successful and I enjoyed being able to talk to some interesting people, I realized I had made one big mistake as soon as I was flipping through my photos on my walk back to campus. Most of the people I interviewed I only took three or four photos of, and some of the photos were blurry or dark; either the lighting was bad and I hadn’t known how to fix it as I was taking the photo, or I hadn’t used the right aperture and the subject was blurry while the background was in focus.
Thankfully, through some editing on Photoshop I was able to make the pictures look better, but I learned a really important lesson through Humans of Columbia: always take WAY more pictures than is required of you. Sometimes, in a batch of 100 pictures, there will be one good one. From now on I will not be afraid to take lots and lots of photos.
Hannah Black 