blog | photography by David Kennedy » multimedia

Pontificating on Multimedia

David — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 15:00:50 +0000

Do One Thing Well

I visited the 62nd annual Missouri Photo Workshop last week, and in the Elks Lodge in Macon, Mo., I watched a string of interviews with some of the faculty at this year’s workshop as they spoke about the benefits and drawbacks of still photographers engaging in multimedia story-telling. While I can’t say I agree with everything he has to say, Randy Olson, a National Geographic contributor for 20 years, does have some very valid points.

Hats off to Nick Michael for putting together this, along with several other compelling video interviews at this year’s MPW. You can see the rest of the series here.

Randy Olson: The Purist from Missouri Photo Workshop on Vimeo.

Thunderstorms over Columbia, Mo.

David — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 15:00:50 +0000

Thunderstorms over the Water Tower from David Kennedy on Vimeo.

In the wee hours of the morning on June 2, 2010, a wave of thunderstorms swept through Columbia, Missouri. I took it as an opportunity to make a “thunderstorm time-lapse,” and set up my tripod. My apartment faces one of Columbia’s landmarks, the water tower, but to get a decent composition of it, I actually had to use a 300mm lens, several feet from the door to my balcony (no need to get wet, though!). I was hoping for some lightning strikes, but the reflections of the lightning on the water tower, and the illumination of the clouds, was all I could get in the hour that I made these images.

I set the camera up on a remote trigger with an intervalometer, and exposed them all at 30 seconds @ f/9 using 200 ISO on the 5D Mark II and 300mm f/4 L lens. The time lapse above is made of 57 such photographs.

I should note that part of the process of putting this time lapse together was discovering opsound.com, a resource of royalty-free music.

Overall, the thunderstorm presented a good opportunity and it was a lot of fun to put the time-lapse together; I hope you enjoy the final product.

Fun with Sequences

David — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:00:02 +0000

Yawnin’ in the Rain

In my picture story & photographic essay class at the Missouri School of Journalism, we have been asked to find some examples of what can make for an effective sequence of images. While I ultimately will be required to produce one that is more about people than wildlife, I did think this sequence of images of a Galapagos Giant Tortoise from this summer was an entertaining and appropriate.

Additionally, the idea of the “sequence” can be interpreted broadly. A sequence could be two pictures (a diptych), three pictures (a triptych), or it could be hundreds put together into a time lapse. Timescapes.org is an example of the latter. They are working on what will eventually be a full-length movie composed of video and time-lapse photography. One example they have produced–a series of time lapses–is shared below. Interesting stuff!

Timescapes – Mountain Light:

Bernoudy Architecture: The Pinkney House

David — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 06:22:14 +0000

After scratching my head for a while to figure out what I was going to do for my final project in Staff Photojournalism, I realized that I should expand on the month-long architecture project that began back in October and ran in the Missourian last week. And unlike the other slideshows this semester, I made this one at home, using Premiere Pro (the school only has Final Cut Express, which, unlike it’s bigger brother, cannot handle square pixels, meaning that all images are warped). All comments welcome!

Boone Life: Come to CoMo for Bike Polo

David — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:12:13 +0000

This weekend I attended the Seventh Midwest Bike Polo Champeenships hosted for the first time in Columbia, Mo. by COMOPOLO and wrote a story and crafted a multimedia slideshow for the Missourian, which published the video and the accompanying story online earlier today.

Content © 2009 David Kennedy | View Original Post | Comment | Filed under Columbia Missourian, Updates | Tags: Bike Polo, Boone Life, Columbia Missourian, multimedia, sports, sports feature, stories, story

A Fightin’ Family: Inside Hulett House Gym

David — Thu, 14 May 2009 01:35:04 +0000

At long last, our group project for Advanced Techniques is done….sort of. In many respects, this is a first draft of our story of Hulett House Gym, a mixed martial arts team in Columbia, Mo. I’m sure that come this fall, when classes reconvene, we can find a way to perfect this into something that we might submit to cPOY.

Many thanks to my teammates, Chris Dunn, Elisa Day and Matt Cloud, for their hard work towards making this project a success.

Content © 2009 David Kennedy | View Original Post | 2 comments | Filed under Updates | Tags: Advanced Techniques, Hulett House Gym, mixed martial arts, MMA, multimedia, photography, photojournalism, slideshow, Sound Slides

Some inspiration in slideshow format

David — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 07:18:54 +0000

I was watching some audio slideshows for a class assignment and found a few that might be of interest to viewers of this site.

Martin Schoeller and Steve Pyke are staff photographers for The New Yorker and have an interesting discussion about some of their portraits that are being exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. through this fall: http://www.newyorker.com/online/multimedia/2009/01/12/090112_audioslideshow_portraiturenow.

I recognized some of Schoeller’s portraits from a different slideshow that was originally published on Media Storm. He certainly has a distinct style. Makes me want to go and make some strip lights………