Photojournalism through Blogging

Yesterday the IMC photo/video team got to go to a presentation by Guy Rhodes, an amazing photojournalist and videographer based in the Chicago area. He has a fairly inspiring story about how anything can lead to you being a photojournalist. He said that he started out by charging his middle school $20 per event to tape it on a little VHS tape camcorder. Pretty basic.

And from that humble start, he is now getting gigs in Florida, New York City, Las Vegas, etc. I find that very encouraging, and you should all check out his Blog sometime (guyrhodes.com/blog/).

I took a couple pictures, one of him, and one of his gear. A really nice guy with some really killer gear:

< This guy right here is Guy Rhodes








Shown here are his 2 Canon 1D Mark4s, one with a 17-40mm f/4, and one with his 400mm f/2.8 (wow). As well he uses a Panasonic Video camera for some of his videography work. That sort of tech makes me realize even more that I should really switch to Canon if I want to get into Video more.

Anyways, more on Photoblogging and such. As you may have read, there was a fairly substantial MLK day celebration here at Valpo, so I went to cover a couple events.

The first event, though there were very few people there out in the cold, was a simple Tree Blessing. Now the simple fact that there is a new tree on campus isn't really anything to get too excited about, but it is the meaning behind the tree that is significant.

Each year, a person or group of people are awarded the "MLK" award, and as a result the campus plants a new tree in their honor. This was the blessing of the tree for this years recipients.

 The Pastor said a fairly poetic blessing, mostly taken from the Bible, pictured here. Then afterwards the award recipients posed for me for an IMC picture.

All in all, a fairly intimate event.

I also went to the Hip-Hop in Politics in Senegal presentation, and from a photojournalistic standpoint, it was ridiculously boring. Literally it was just a power-point presentation in  a windowless square room in the student union. But the idea behind it was much more powerful than the simple space suggested.

The professor who was actually in Senegal while the events were taking place.

I might come back and edit this post, and go into more detail about the actual things that happened in Senegal, but the gist of it is that a group of Rappers radically altered the outcome of an election by protesting and writing songs about it.

So the rappers and hip-hop artists helped to basically out a corrupt leader in Senegal. Their "slogan" as it were, was "Yen a Marre" which is french for "We're Fed Up." Fed up with the established order and corruption. However, this "overthrow" was done mostly peacefully through demonstrations and music videos and such things, as opposed to violent opposition such as what happened in Libya and Egypt.

All in all, this was a fairly interesting assignment for my photo class, and one that I will probably use the knowledge gained in the future.

   I found it really interesting that in one of their songs they made allusions to Hitler and De Gaulle. These are figures from quite a ways back in history, so it was strange to me that they would use these people to try to further their cause against a corrupt president who wasn't really killing anyone. I think it is sort of in "bad taste" to make this comparison.


on that note:

Preow

Kevin

TV: Top Gear
Movie: Kiki's Delivery Service
Game: Mirrors Edge (madness)
Music: Thirteen Senses
Food: Not enough